A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2

by George Saintsbury

  CHAPTER VI

  THE NOVEL OF STYLE--GAUTIER, MERIMEE, GERARD DE NERVAL, MUSSET, VIGNY

  In arranging this volume I have thought it worth while to include, in asingle chapter and _nominatim_ in the title thereof, five writers ofprose novels or tales; all belonging to "1830"; four of them at leastranking with all but the greatest of that great period; but no oneexclusively or even essentially a novelist as Balzac and George Sandwere in their different ways, and none of them attempting such imposingbulk-and-plan of novel-matter as that which makes up the prose fictionof Hugo. Gautier was an admirable, and Musset and Vigny at their bestwere each a consummate, poet; while the first-named was a "polygraph" ofthe polygraphs, in every kind of _belles-lettres_. Merimee's novels ortales form a small part of his whole work. "Gerard" is perhaps onlyadmissible here by courtesy, though more than one or two readers, Ihope, would feel his absence as a dark gap in the book. Musset, again,not ill at short stories, is far better at short plays. _One_ novel ofVigny's has indeed enjoyed great fame; but, as will be seen, I amunluckily unable to admire it very much, and I include him here--partlybecause I do not wish to herd so clear a name with the Sues and theSoulies, even with the Sandeaus and Bernards--partly because, though hisstyle in prose is not so marked as that in verse, some of his minor workin fiction is extremely interesting. But though so much of their work,and in Musset's and Vigny's cases all their best work, lies outside ourprovince, and though they themselves, with the possible exception ofGerard and Gautier, who have strong affinities, are markedly differentfrom one another, there is one point which they all have in common, andthis point supplies the general title of this chapter. Style of the moreseparable and elaborate kind does not often make its appearance veryearly in literary departments; and there may be (_v. inf._) some specialreasons why it should not do so in prose fiction. With the exception ofMarivaux, who had carried his attention to it over the boundary-line ofmannerism, few earlier novelists, though some of them were greatwriters, had made a point of it, the chief exceptions being in theparticular line of "wit," such as Hamilton, Crebillon _fils_, andVoltaire. Chateaubriand had been almost the first to attempt anovel-_rhetoric_; and it must be remembered that Chateaubriand was asort of human _magnus Apollo_ throughout the July monarchy. At any rate,it is a conspicuous feature in all these writers, and may serve as alink between them.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Gautier--his burden of "style."]

  Some readers may know (for I, and the others, which I shall probablyquote again, have quoted it before now) a remark of Emile de Girardinwhen Theophile Gautier asked him how people liked a story which "Theo"had prevailed on that experienced editor to insert as a _feuilleton_ inthe _Presse_: "Mon ami, l'abonne ne s'amuse pas _franchement_. Il estgene par le style." Girardin, though not exactly a genius, was anexceedingly clever man, and knew the foot of his public--perhaps of"_the_ public"--to a hundredth of an inch. But he could hardly haveanticipated the extent to which his criticism would reflect the attitudeof persons who would have been, and would be, not a little offended atbeing classed with _l'abonne_. The reproach of "over-styling" has beencast at Gautier by critics of the most different types, and--morecuriously at first sight than after a moment's reflection--by some whoare themselves style-mad, but whose favourite vanities in that matterare different from his. I can hardly think of any writer--Herrick astreated by Hazlitt is the chief exception that occurs to me at themoment--against whom this cheap and obvious, though, alas! not veryfrequently possible, charge of "bright far-shining emptiness," ofglittering frigidity, of colour without flesh and blood, of art withoutmatter, etc., etc., has been cast so violently--or so unjustly. Inliterature, as in law and war, the favourite method of offensive defenceis to reserve your _triarii_, your "colophon" of arms or arguement, tothe last; but there are cases in all three where it is best to carry animportant point at once and hold it. I think that this is one of thesecases; and I do not think that the operation can be conducted withbetter chance of success than by inserting here that outline,[198] withspecimens, of _La Morte Amoureuse_ which has been already promised--orthreatened--in the Preface. For here the glamour--if it be onlyglamour--of the style will have disappeared; the matter will remain.

  [Sidenote: Abstract (with translations) of _La Morte Amoureuse_.]

  You ask me, my brother, if I have ever loved. I answer "Yes." But it is a wild and terrible story, a memory whose ashes, with all my sixty-six years, I hardly dare to disturb. To you I can refuse nothing, but I would not tell the tale to a less experienced soul. The facts are so strange that I myself cannot believe in their actual occurrence. For three years I was the victim of a diabolical delusion, and every night--God grant it was a dream--I, a poor country priest, led the life of the lost, the life of the worldling and the debauchee. A single chance of too great complacency went near to destroy my soul; but at last, with God's aid and my patron saint's, I exorcised the evil spirit which had gained possession of me. Till then my life was double, and the counterpart by night was utterly different from the life by day. By day I was a priest of the Lord, pure, and busied with holy things. By night, no sooner had I closed my eyes than I became a youthful gallant, critical in women, dogs, and horses, prompt with dice and bottle, free of hand and tongue; and when waking-time came at dawn of day, it seemed to me as if I then fell asleep and was a priest only in dreams. From this sleep-life I have kept the memory of words and things, which recur to me against my will; and though I have never quitted the walls of my parsonage, those who hear me talk would rather think me a man of the world and of many experiences, who has entered the religious life hoping to finish in God's bosom the evening of his stormy day, than a humble seminarist, whose life has been spent in an obscure parish, buried deep in woods, and far removed from the course of the world.

  Yes, I have loved--as no one else has loved, with a mad and wild passion so violent that I can hardly understand how it failed to break my heart.

  After rapidly sketching the history of the early seminary days of thepriest Romuald, his complete seclusion and ignorance almost of the verynames of world and woman, the tale goes on to the day of his ordination.He is in the church, almost in a trance of religious fervour; thebuilding itself, the gorgeously robed bishop, the stately ceremonies,seem to him a foretaste of heaven, when suddenly--

  By chance I raised my head, which I had hitherto kept bowed, and saw before me, within arm's length as it seemed, but in reality at some distance and beyond the chancel rails, a woman of rare beauty and royally apparelled. At once, as it were, scales dropped from my eyes. I was in the case of a blind man whose sight is suddenly restored. The bishop, but now so dazzling to me, became dim, the tapers in their golden stands paled like the stars at morning, and darkness seemed to pervade the church. On this background of shade the lovely vision stood out like an angelic appearance, self-illumined, and giving rather than receiving light. I dropped my eyelids, firmly resolving not again to raise them, that so I might escape the distraction of outward things, for I felt the spell more and more, and I hardly knew what I did; but a minute afterwards I again looked up, for I perceived her beauty still shining across my dropped lashes as if with prismatic glory, and encircled by the crimson halo that, to the gazer, surrounds the sun. How beautiful she was! Painters, when in their chase of the ideal they have followed it to the skies and carried off therefrom the divine image of Our Lady, never drew near this fabulous reality. Nor are the poet's words more adequate than the colours of the limner. She was tall and goddess-like in shape and port. Her soft fair hair rolled on either side of her temples in golden streams that crowned her as with a queen's diadem. Her forehead, white and transparent, tinged only by blue vein-stains, stretched in calm amplitude over two dark eyebrows--a contr
ast enhanced still further by the sea-green lustre of her glittering and unfathomable eyes. Ah, what eyes! One flash of them was enough to settle the fate of a man. Never had I seen in human eyes such life, such clearness, such ardour, such humid brilliancy; and there shot from them glances like arrows, which went straight to my heart. Whether the flame which lit them came from hell or heaven I know not, but from one or the other it came, most surely. No daughter of Eve she, but an angel or a fiend, perhaps--who knows?--something of both. The quarrelets of pearl flashed through her scarlet smile, and as her mouth moved the dimples sank and filled by turns in the blush-rose softness of her exquisite cheek. Over the even smoothness of her half-uncovered shoulders played a floating gloss as of agate, and a river of large pearls, not greatly different in hue from her neck, descended towards her breast. Now and then she raised her head with a peacock-like gesture, and sent a quiver through the ruff which enshrined her like a frame of silver filigree.

  The strange vision causes on Romuald strange yet natural effects. Hisardent aspiration for the priesthood changes to loathing. He even triesto renounce his vows, to answer "No" to the questions to which he shouldanswer "Yes," and thus to comply with the apparent demand of thestranger's eyes. But he cannot. The awe of the ceremony is yet toostrong on his soul, if not on his senses and imagination; and the fatalwords are spoken, the fatal rites gone through, despite the promises ofuntold bliss which the eyes, evermore caressing and entreating, thoughsadder, as the completion of the sacrifice approaches, continue to makehim.

  At last it was over--I was a priest. Never did face of woman wear an expression of such anguish as hers. The girl whose lover drops lifeless at her side, the mother by her dead child's cradle, Eve at the gate of paradise, the miser who finds his buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet whose greatest work has perished in the flames, have not a more desolate air. The blood left her countenance, and it became as of marble; her arms fell by her side, as if their muscles had become flaccid; and she leant against a pillar, for her limbs refused to support her. As for me, with a livid face bathed as if in the dews of death, I bent my tottering steps towards the church door. The air seemed to stifle me, the vaulted roof settled on my shoulders, and on my head seemed to rest the whole crushing weight of the dome. As I was on the point of crossing the threshold a hand touched mine suddenly--a woman's hand--a touch how new to me! It was as cold as the skin of a serpent, yet the contact burnt like the brand of a hot iron. "Unhappy wretch! What have you done?" she said to me in a low voice, and then disappeared in the crowd.

  On the way to the seminary, whither a comrade has to support him, forhis emotion is evident to all, a page, unnoticed, slips into Romuald'shand a tablet with the simple words, "Clarimonde. At the ConciniPalace." He passes some days in a state almost of delirium, now formingwild plans of escape, now shocked at his sinful desires, but alwaysregretting the world he has renounced, and still more Clarimonde.

  I do not know how long I remained in this condition, but, as in one of my furious writhings I turned on my bed, I saw the Father Serapion standing in the middle of the cell gazing steadily at me. Shame seized me, and I hid my face with my hands. "Romuald," said he, at the end of a few minutes, "something extraordinary has come on you. Your conduct is inexplicable. You, so pious, so gentle, you pace your cell like a caged beast. Take heed, my brother, of the suggestions of the Evil One, for he is wroth that you have given yourself to the Lord, and lurks round you like a ravening wolf, if haply a last effort may make you his."

  Then, bidding him redouble his pious exercises, and telling him that hehas been presented by the bishop to a country cure, and must be ready tostart on the morrow, Serapion leaves him. Romuald is in despair atquitting the neighbourhood of Clarimonde. But his seminaristinexperience makes him feel, more than ever, the impossibility even ofdiscovering her, and the hints of Serapion have in a manner reawakenedhis conscience. He departs on the morrow without protest. They quit thecity, and begin to climb the hills which surround it.

  At the top I turned round once more to give a last look to the place where dwelt Clarimonde. The city lay wholly in the shadow of a cloud; its blue and red roofs were blended in one general half-tint, above which here and there white flakes of the smoke of morning fires hovered. By some optical accident a single edifice stood out gilded by a ray of light, and more lofty than the mass of surrounding buildings. Though more than a league off, it seemed close to us. The smallest details were visible--the turrets, the terraces, the windows, and even the swallow-tailed vanes. "What is that sunlit palace yonder?" I asked of Serapion. He shaded his eyes with his hand, and after looking he answered, "It is the palace which Prince Concini gave to the courtesan Clarimonde. Terrible things are done there." As he spoke, whether it were fact or fancy I know not, it seemed to me that I saw a slender white form glide out on the terrace, glitter there for a second, and then disappear. It was Clarimonde! Could she have known that at that moment, from the rugged heights of the hill which separated me from her, and which I was never more to descend, I was bending a restless and burning gaze on the palace of her abode, brought near me by a mocking play of light, as if to invite me to enter? Ah yes! she knew it doubtless, for her soul was bound to mine too nearly not to feel its least movements; and this it must have been which urged her to climb the terrace in the cold morning dews, wrapped only in her snowy nightgear.

  But the die is cast, and the journey continues. They reach the modestparsonage where Romuald is to pass the rest of his days, and he isinstalled in his cure, Serapion returning to the city. Romuald attackshis work desperately, hoping to find peace there, but he very partiallysucceeds. The words of Clarimonde and the touch of her hand haunt himconstantly, and sometimes even stranger things happen. He sees the flashof the sea-green eyes across his garden hedges; he seems to find theimprint of feet, which are assuredly not those of any inhabitant of thevillage, on the gravel walks. At last one night he is summoned late tothe bedside of a dying person, by a messenger of gorgeous dress andoutlandish aspect. The journey is made in the darkness on fiery steeds,through strange scenery, and in an unknown direction. A splendid palaceis at length reached--too late, for the priest is met by the news thathis penitent has already expired. But he is entreated, and consents, atleast to watch and pray by the body during the night. He is led into thechamber of death, and finds that the corpse is Clarimonde. At first hemechanically turns to prayer, but other thoughts inevitably occur. Hiseyes wander to the appearance and furniture of the boudoir suddenly putto so different use: the gorgeous hangings of crimson damask contrastingwith the white shroud, the faded rose by the bedside, the scatteredsigns of revelry, distract and disturb him. Strange fancies come thick.The air seems other than that to which he is accustomed in such chambersof the dead. The corpse appears from time to time to make slightmovements; even sighs seem to echo his own. At last he lifts the veilwhich covers her, and contemplates the exquisite features he had lastseen at the fatal moment of his sacrifice. He cannot believe that she isdead. The faint blush-rose tints are hardly dulled, the hand is notcolder than he recollects it.

  The night was now far spent. I felt that the moment of eternal separation was at hand, and I could not refuse myself the last sad pleasure of giving one kiss to the dead lips of her, who, living, had had all my love. Oh, wonder! A faint breath mingled with mine, the eyes opened and became once more brilliant. She sighed, and uncrossing her arms she clasped them round my neck with an air of ineffable contentment. "Ah!" she said, with a voice as faint and as sweet as the last dying vibrations of a harp, "is it you, Romuald? I have waited for you so long that now I am dead. But we are betrothed to one another from this moment, and I can see you
and visit you henceforward. Romuald, I loved you! Farewell; this is all I have to say; and thus I restore the life you gave me for a minute with your kiss. We shall soon meet again." Her head fell back, but she still held me encircled. A furious gust of wind forced in the window and swept into the room: the last leaflet of the white rose quivered for a minute on its stalk and then fell, and floated through the open casement, bearing with it the soul of Clarimonde. The lamp went out, and I sank in a swoon.

  He wakes in his own room, and hears from his ancient _gouvernante_ thatthe same strange escort which carried him off has brought him back.Soon afterwards his friend Serapion comes to visit him, not altogetherto his delight, for he, rightly suspects the father of some knowledge ofhis secret. Serapion announces to him, as a matter of general news, thatthe courtesan Clarimonde is dead, and mentions that strange rumours havebeen current respecting her--some declaring her to be a species ofvampire, and her lovers to have all perished mysteriously. As he saysthis he watches Romuald, who cannot altogether conceal his thoughts.Thereat Serapion--

  "My son," said he, "it is my duty to warn you that your feet are on the brink of an abyss; take heed of falling. Satan's hands reach far, and the grave is not always a faithful gaoler. Clarimonde's tombstone should be sealed with a triple seal, for it is not, say they, the first time she has died. May God watch over you." Saying this, Serapion slowly went out, and I saw him no more. I soon recovered completely, and returned to my usual occupations; and though I never forgot the memory of Clarimonde and the words of the father, nothing extraordinary for a time occurred to confirm in any way his ill-omened forebodings, so that I began to believe that his apprehensions and my own terror were unfounded. But one night I had a dream. Scarcely had I fallen asleep when I heard my bed-curtains drawn, the rings grating sharply on the rods. I raised myself abruptly on my elbow and saw before me the shadowy figure of a woman. At once I recognised Clarimonde. She carried in her hand a small lamp of the shape of those which are placed in tombs, and the light of it gave to her tapering fingers a rosy transparency which, with gradually fainter tints, prolonged itself till it was lost in the milky whiteness of her naked arm. The only garment she had on was the linen shroud which covered her on her death-bed, and she tried to hold up its folds on her breast as if shame-stricken at her scanty clothing. But her little hand was not equal to the task; and so white was she that the lamplight failed to make distinction between the colour of the drapery and the hue of the flesh. Wrapped in this fine tissue, she was more like an antique marble statue of a bather than a live woman. Dead or alive, woman or statue, shadow or body, her beauty was unchangeable, but the green flash of her eyes was somewhat dulled, and her mouth, so red of old, was now tinted only with a faint rose-tint like that of her cheeks. The blue flowerets in her hair were withered and had lost almost all their petals; yet she was still all charming--so charming that, despite the strangeness of the adventure and the unexplained fashion of her entrance, no thought of fear occurred to me. She placed the lamp on the table and seated herself on the foot of my bed; then, bending towards me, she spoke in the soft and silvery voice that I have heard from none but her. "I have kept you waiting long, dear Romuald, and you must have thought that I had forgotten you. But I come from very far--from a place whence no traveller has yet returned. There is neither sun nor moon, nor aught but space and shadow; no road is there, nor pathway to guide the foot, nor air to uphold the wing; and yet here am I, for love is stronger than death, and is his master at the last. Ah! what sad faces, what sights of terror, I have met! With what pains has my soul, regaining this world by force of will, found again my body and reinstalled itself! With what effort have I lifted the heavy slab they laid upon me, even to the bruising of my poor feeble hands! Kiss them, dear love, and they will be cured." She placed one by one the cold palms of her little hands against my mouth, and I kissed them again and again, while she watched me with her smile of ineffable content. I at once forgot Serapion's advice, I forgot my sacred office; I succumbed without resistance at the first summons, I did not even attempt to repulse the tempter.

  She tells him how she had dreamed of him long before she saw him; howshe had striven to prevent his sacrifice; how she was jealous of God,whom he preferred to her; and how, though she had forced the gates ofthe tomb to come to him, though he had given life back to her with akiss, though her recovery of it has no other end than to make him happy,she herself is still miserable because she has only half his heart. Inhis delirium he tells her, to console her, that he loves her "as much asGod."

  "Instantly the glitter as of chrysoprase flashed once more from hereyes. 'Is that true?--as much as God?' cried she, winding her arms roundme. 'If 'tis so you can come with me; you can follow me whither Iwill.'" And fixing the next night for the rendezvous, she vanishes. Hewakes, and, considering it merely a dream, resumes his pious exercises.But the next night Clarimonde, faithful to her word, reappears--nolonger in ghostly attire, but radiant and splendidly dressed. She bringsher lover the full costume of a cavalier, and when he has donned itthey sally forth, taking first the fiery steeds of his earlier nocturnaladventure, then a carriage, in which he and Clarimonde, heart to heart,head on shoulder, hand in hand, journey through the night.

  Never had I been so happy. For the moment I had forgotten everything, and thought no more of my priesthood than of some previous state of life. From that night forward my existence was as it were doubled, and there were in me two men, strangers each to the other's existence. Sometimes I thought myself a priest who dreamt that he was a gallant, sometimes a gallant who dreamt that he was a priest.... I could not distinguish the reality from the illusion, and knew not which were my waking and which my sleeping moments. Two spirals, entangled without touching, form the nearest representation of this life. The young cavalier, the coxcomb, the debauchee, mocked the priest; the priest held the dissipations of the gallant in horror. Notwithstanding the strangeness of the situation, I do not think my reason was for a moment affected. The perceptions of my two existences were always firm and clear, and there was only one anomaly which I could not explain, and this was that the same unbroken sentiment of identity subsisted in two beings so different. Of this I could give myself no explanation, whether I thought myself to be really the vicar of a poor country village, or else Il Signor Romualdo, lover in possession of Clarimonde.

  The place, real or apparent, of Il Signor Romualdo's sojourn with hisbeloved is Venice, where they inhabit a gorgeous palace, and whereRomuald enters into all the follies and dissipations of the place. He isunalterably faithful to Clarimonde, and she to him; and the time passesin a perpetual delirium. But every night--as it now seems to him--hefinds himself once more a poor country priest, horrified at the misdeedsof his other personality, and seeking to atone for them by prayer andfasting and good works. Even in his Venetian moments he sometimes thinksof Serapion's words, and at length he has especial reason to rememberthem.

  For some time Clarimonde's health had not been very good; her complexion faded from day to day. The doctors who were called in could not discover the disease, and after useless prescriptions gave up the case. Day by day she grew paler and colder, till she was nearly as white and as corpse-like as on the famous night at the mysterious castle. I was in despair at this wasting away, but she, though touched by my sorrow, only smiled at me sweetly and sadly with the fatal smile of those who feel their death approaching. One morning I was sitting by her. In slicing some fruit it happened that I cut my finger somewhat deeply. The blood flowed in crimson streamlets, and some of it spurted on Clarimonde. Her eyes brightened at once, and over her face there passed a look of fierce j
oy which I had never before seen in her. She sprang from the bed with catlike activity and pounced on the wound, which she began to suck with an air of indescribable delight, swallowing the blood in sips, slowly and carefully, as an epicure tastes a costly vintage. Her eyelids were half closed, and the pupils of her sea-green eyes flattened and became oblong instead of round.... From time to time she interrupted herself to kiss my hand; then she began again to squeeze the edges of the wound with her lips in order to draw from it a few more crimson drops. When she saw that the blood ran no longer, she rose with bright and humid eyes, rosier than a May morning, her cheeks full, her hands warm, yet no longer parched, fairer in short than ever, and in perfect health. "I shall not die! I shall not die!" she said, clasping my neck in a frenzy of joy. "I can live long and love you. My life is in yours, my very existence comes from you. A few drops of your generous blood, more precious and sovereign than all the elixirs of the world, have given me back to life."

  This scene gave me matter for much reflection, and put into my head some strange thoughts as to Clarimonde. That very evening, when sleep had transported me to my parsonage, I found there Father Serapion, graver and more careworn than ever. He looked at me attentively and said, "Not content with destroying your soul, are you bent also on destroying your body? Unhappy youth, into what snares have you fallen!" The tone in which he said this struck me much at the time; but, lively as the impression was, other thoughts soon drove it from my mind. However, one evening, with the aid of a glass, on whose tell-tale position Clarimonde had not counted, I saw her pouring a powder into the cup of spiced wine which she was wont to prepare after supper. I took the cup, and, putting it to my lips, I set it down, as if intending to finish it at leisure. But in reality I availed myself of a minute when her back was turned to empty it away, and I soon after went to bed, determined to remain awake and see what would happen. I had not long to wait. Clarimonde entered as soon as she had convinced herself that I slept. She uncovered my arm and drew from her hair a little gold pin; then she murmured under her breath, "Only one drop, one little crimson drop, one ruby just to tip the bodkin! As you love me still I must not die. Ah, poor love! I am going to drink his blood, his beautiful blood, so bright and so purple. Sleep, my only treasure; sleep, my darling, my deity; I will do you no harm; I will only take so much of your life as I need to save my own. Did I not love you so much I might resolve to have other lovers, whose veins I could drain; but since I have known you I hate all others. Ah, dear arm, how round it is, and how white! How shall I ever dare to pierce the sweet blue veins!" And while she spoke she wept, so that I felt her tears rain on the arm she held. At last she summoned courage; she pricked me slightly with the bodkin and began to suck out the blood. But she drank only a few drops, as if she feared to exhaust me, and then carefully bound up my arm after anointing it with an unguent which closed the wound at once. I could now doubt no longer: Serapion was right. Yet, in spite of this certainty, I could not help loving Clarimonde, and I would willingly have given her all the blood whereof she had need, to sustain her artificial life. Besides, I had not much to fear; the woman was my warrant against the vampire; and what I had heard and seen completely reassured me. I had then well-nourished veins, which were not to be soon drawn dry, nor had I reason to grudge and count their drops. I would have pierced my arm myself and bid her drink. I was careful to make not the slightest allusion to the narcotic she had given me, or to the scene that followed, and we lived in unbroken harmony. But my priestly scruples tormented me more than ever, and I knew not what new penance to invent to blunt my passion and mortify my flesh. Though my visions were wholly involuntary and my will had nothing to do with them, I shrank from touching the host with hands thus sullied and spirit defiled by debauchery, whether in act or in dream. To avoid falling into these harassing hallucinations, I tried to prevent myself sleeping; I held my eyelids open, and remained in a standing posture, striving with all my force against sleep. But soon the waves of slumber drowned my eyes, and seeing that the struggle was hopeless, I let my hands drop in weariness, and was once more carried to the shores of delusion.... Serapion exhorted me most fervently, and never ceased reproaching me with my weakness and my lack of zeal. One day, when I had been more agitated than usual, he said to me, "There is only one way to relieve you from this haunting plague, and, though it be extreme, we must try it. Great evils need heroic remedies. I know where Clarimonde was buried; we must disinter her, and you shall see the real state of your lady-love. You will hardly be tempted to risk your soul for a vile body, the prey of worms and ready to turn to dust. That, if anything, will restore you to yourself." For my part, I was so weary of this double life that I closed with his offer. I longed to know once for all, which--priest or gallant--was the dupe of a delusion, and I was resolved to sacrifice one of my two lives for the good of the other--yea, if it were necessary, to sacrifice both, for such an existence as I was leading could not last.... Father Serapion procured a mattock, a crowbar, and a lantern, and at midnight we set out for the cemetery, whose plan and arrangements he knew well. After directing the rays of the dark lantern on the inscriptions of several graves, we came at last to a stone half buried under tall grass, and covered with moss and lichen, whereon we deciphered this epitaph, "Here lies Clarimonde, who in her lifetime was the fairest in the world." "'Tis here," said Serapion; and, placing his lantern on the ground, he slipped the crowbar into the chinks of the slab and essayed to lift it. The stone yielded, and he set to work with the spade. As for me, stiller and more gloomy than the night itself, I watched him at work, while he, bending over his ill-omened task, sweated and panted, his forced and heavy breath sounding like the gasps of the dying. The sight was strange, and lookers-on would rather have taken us for tomb-breakers and robbers of the dead than for God's priests. The zeal of Serapion was of so harsh and savage a cast, that it gave him a look more of the demon than of the apostle or the angel, and his face, with its severe features deeply marked by the glimmer of the lantern, was hardly reassuring. A cold sweat gathered on my limbs and my hair stood on end. In my heart I held Serapion's deed to be an abominable sacrilege, and I could have wished that a flash of lightning might issue from the womb of the heavy clouds, which rolled low above our heads, and burn him to ashes. The owls perched about the cypress trees, and, disturbed by the lantern, came and flapped its panes heavily with their dusty wings, the foxes barked in the distance, and a thousand sinister echoes troubled the silence. At length Serapion's spade struck the coffin with the terrible hollow sound that nothingness returns to those who intrude on it. He lifted the lid, and I saw Clarimonde, as pale as marble, and with her hands joined; there was no fold in her snow-white shroud from head to foot; at the corner of her blanched lips there shone one little rosy drop. At the sight Serapion broke into fury. "Ah! fiend, foul harlot, drinker of gold and blood, we have found you!" said he, and he scattered holy water over corpse and coffin, tracing the sign of the cross with his brush. No sooner had the blessed shower touched my Clarimonde than her fair body crumbled into dust, and became nought but a hideous mixture of ashes and half-burnt bones. "There, Signor Romuald," said the inexorable priest, pointing to the remains, "there is your mistress. Are you still tempted to escort her to the Lido or to Fusina?" I bowed my head; a mighty ruin had taken place within me. I returned to my parsonage, and Il Signor Romualdo, the lover of Clarimonde, said farewell for ever to the poor priest whose strange companion he had been so long. Only the next night I again saw Clarim
onde. She said to me, as at first in the church porch, "Poor wretch, what have you done? Why did you listen to that frantic priest? Were you not happy? And what harm had I done you that you should violate my grave, and shamefully expose the misery of my nothingness? Henceforward all communication between us, soul and body, is broken. Farewell, you will regret me." She vanished in the air like a vapour, and I saw her no more.

  Alas! she spoke too truly. I have regretted her again and again. I regret her still. The repose of my soul has indeed been dearly bought, and the love of God itself has not been too much to replace the gap left by hers. This, my brother, is the history of my youth. Never look at woman, and let your eyes as you walk be fixed upon the ground; for, pure and calm as you may be, a single moment is sufficient to make you lose your eternal peace.

  [Sidenote: Criticism thereof.]

  Now, though to see a thing in translation be always to see it "as in aglass darkly"; and though in this case the glass may be unduly flawedand clouded, my own critical faculties must not only now beunusually[199] enfeebled by age, but must always have been crippled bysome strange affection, if certain things are not visible here to anyintelligent and impartial reader. The story, of course, is not pureinvention; several versions of parts, if not the whole, of it will occurto any one who has some knowledge of literature; and I have recentlyread a variant of great beauty and "eeriness" from the Japanese.[200]But the merit of a story depends, not on its originality as matter, buton the manner in which it is told. It surely cannot be denied that thisis told excellently. That the part of Serapion (though somebody orsomething of the kind is almost necessary) is open to some criticism,may be granted. He seems to know too much and yet not enough: and if hewas to interfere at all, one does not see why he did not do it earlier.But this is the merest hole-picking, and the biggest hole it can makewill not catch the foot or the little finger of any worthy reader. As tothe beauty of the phrasing, even in another language, and as rendered byno consummate artist, there can be little question about that. Indeedthere we have consent about Gautier, though, as has been seen, theconsent has not always been thoroughly complimentary to him. To go astep further, the way in which the diction and imagery are made toprovide frame and shade and colour for the narrative leaves very littleroom for cavil. Without any undue or excessive "prose poetry," thedescriptions are like those of the best imaginative-pictorial verseitself. The first appearance of Clarimonde; the scene at her death-bedand that of her dream-resurrection, have, I dare affirm it, never beensurpassed in verse or prose for their special qualities: while thebackward view of the city and the recital of what we may call Serapion'ssoul-murder of the enchantress come little behind them.

  But, it may be said, "You are still kicking at open doors. The degree ofyour estimate is, we think, extravagant, but that it is deserved to someextent nobody denies. In mere point of expression, and even to someextent, again, in conception of beauty, Gautier's manner, though toomuch of one kind, and that too old-fashioned, is admitted; it is hismatter which is questioned or denied."

  [Sidenote: A parallel from painting.]

  Here also, I think, the counter-attack can be completely barred orbroken to the satisfaction of all but those who cannot or will not see.In the first place one must make a distinction, which ought not to beregarded as over-subtilising, but which certainly seems to be ignored bymany people. There are in all arts, and more especially in the art ofliterature, two stages or sets of stages in the discharge of that dutyof every artist--the creation of beauty. The one is satisfied by theachievement of the beautiful in the presentation itself; the other givesyou, in your own interior collection or museum, the thing presented.This is not the common distinction between form and matter, betweenstyle and substance, between subject and treatment; it is something moreintimate and "metaphysical." To illustrate it, let me take a pair ofinstances, not from letters, but from painting as produced by two deadmasters of our own, Rossetti and Albert Moore. I used to think thelast-named painter disgracefully undervalued both by the public and bycritics. One could look at those primrose-tinted ladies of his, withtheir gossamer films of raiment and their flowerage always suggestive ofthe asphodel mead, for hours: and if one's soul had had a substantialPalace of Art of her own, there would have been a corridor wholly AlbertMoorish--a corridor, for his things never looked well with otherpeople's and they could not, by themselves, have filled a hall.

  But their beauty, as has been untruly said of Gautier's representationin the other art, _was_ "their sole duty." You never wanted to kiss eventhe most beautiful of them, or to talk to her, or even to sit at herfeet, except for purposes of looking at her, for which that position hasits own special advantages. And although by no means mere pastiches orreplicas of each other, they had little of the qualities whichconstitute personality. They were almost literally "dreams that wavedbefore the half-shut eye," and dreams which you knew to be dreams at thetime; less even than dreams--shadows, and less even than shadows, forshadows imply substance, and these did not. If you loved them you lovedthem always, and could not be divorced from them. But it was an entirelycontemplative love; and if divorce was unthinkable it was because therewas no _thorus_ and no _mensa_ at which they could possibly havefigured.[201] They were the Eves of a Paradise of _two_ dimensions only.

  Now with Rossetti it was entirely different. His drawing may have beenas faulty as people said it was, and he may have been as fond as theyalso said of bestowing upon all his subjects exaggerated and almostungainly features, which possibly belonged to the Blessed Damozel, butwere not the most indisputable part of her blessedness. But they were,despite their similarity of type, all personal and individual, and allsuggestive to the mind and the emotions of real women, and of the thingswhich real women are and do and suffer. And they were all differentlysuggestive. Proserpine and Beata Beatrix; the devotional figures intheir quietude or their ecstasy, and the forlorn leaguer-lasses of thatlittle masterpiece of the novitiate, "Hesterna Rosa"; the Damozelherself and a Corsican lady whose portrait, unpublished and unexhibited,has been familiar to me for six-and-thirty years;--all these and all theothers would behave to you, and you would behave to them, if they couldbe vivified, in ways different individually but real and live.

  [Sidenote: The reality.]

  Now it is beauty of reality as well as of presentation that I at leastfind in _La Morte Amoureuse_. Clarimonde alive is very much more than a"shadow on glass"; Clarimonde dead is more alive than many live women.

  [Sidenote: And the passion of it.]

  But the audacity of infatuation need not stop here. I should claim for_La Morte Amoureuse_, and for Gautier as the author of it, more thanthis. It appears to me to be one of the very few expressions in Frenchprose of really passionate love. It is, with _Manon Lescaut_ and_Julie_, the most consummate utterance that I at least know, in thatdivision of literature, of the union of sensual with transcendentalenamourment. Why this is so rare in French is a question fitter fortreatment in a _History of the French Temperament_ than in one of theFrench Novel. That it is so I believe to be a simple fact, and simplefacts require little talking about. No prose literature has so muchlove-making in it as French, and none so much about different species oflove: _amour de tete_ and _amour des sens_ especially, but also notunfrequently _amour de coeur_, and even _amour d'ame_. But of thecombination that _we_ call "passionate love"--that fills our own latesixteenth, early seventeenth, and whole nineteenth century literature,and that requires love of the heart and the head, the soul and thesenses, together--it has (outside poetry of course)[202] only the threebooks just mentioned and a few passages such as Atala's dying speech,Adolphe's, alas! too soon obliterated reflections on his first successwith Ellenore, perhaps one or two more before _La Morte Amoureuse_, andeven since its day not many. Maupassant (_v. inf._) _could_ manage thecombination, but too often confined himself to exhibitions of theseparate and imperfect divisions, whereof, no doubt, the number isendless.

  T
hat Gautier always or often maintained himself at this pitch, either ofwhat we may call power of projecting live personages or of exhibition ofgreat passions, it would be idle and uncritical to contend; that he didso here, and thereby put himself at once and for ever on the higher,nay, highest level of literature, I do, after fifty years' study of thething and of endless other things, impenitently and impavidly affirm.

  [Sidenote: Other short stories.]

  What is more, in his shorter productions he was often not far below it,save in respect of intensity. If I do not admire _Fortunio_ quite somuch as some people do, it is not so much because of its comparativeheartlessness--a thing rare in Gautier--as because for once, and I thinkonce only in pieces of its scale, the malt of the description _does_ getabove the meal of the personal interest, though that personal interestexists. But _Jettatura_, with its combination of romantic and tragicalappeal; _Avatar_, with its extraordinary mixture of romance, again, withhumour, its "excitingness," and its delicacy of taste; the equallyextraordinary felicity of the dealings with that too often unmanageableimplement the "classical dictionary" in _Arria Marcella_, _Une Nuit deCleopatre_, and perhaps especially _Le Roi Candaule_; the tinysketches--half-_nouvelle_ and half-"middle" article--of _Le Pied de laMomie_, _La Pipe d'Opium_, and _Le Club des Haschischins_,--whatmarvellous consummateness in the various specifications and conditionsdo these afford us!

  Sometimes, however, I have thought that just as _La Morte Amoureuse_ isalmost or quite sufficient text for vindicating the greatness orgreaterness of "Theo," so his earliest book of prose fiction, _LesJeune-France_, will serve the same purpose for another side of him,lesser if anybody likes, but exceptionally "complementary." Inparticular it possesses a quality which up to his time was very rare inFrance, has not been extraordinarily common there even since, and isstill, even in its ancestral home with ourselves, sometimesinconceivably blundered about--the quality of Humour.[203]

  [Sidenote: Gautier's humour--_Les Jeune-France_.]

  For wit, France can, of course, challenge the world; nay, she can domore, she can say to the world, "I have taught you this; and you are nomatch for your teacher." But in Humour the case is notoriously altered.None of the Latin nations, except Spain, the least purely Latin of them,has ever achieved it, as the original or unoriginal Latins themselvesnever did, with the exception of the lighter forms of it in Catullus, ofthe grimmer in Lucretius--those greatest and most un-Roman of Romanpoets.[204] In all the wide and splendid literature of French before thenineteenth century only Rabelais and Moliere[205] can lay claim to it.Romanticism brings humour in its train, as Classicism brings wit; but itis curious how slow was the Romanticisation of French in this respect,with one exception. There is no real humour in Hugo, Vigny, George Sand,Balzac, scarcely even in Musset. Dumas, though showing decidedly goodgifts of possibility in his novels, does not usually require it there;the absence of it in his dramas need hardly be dwelt on. Merimee, onecannot but think, might have had it if he had chosen; but Merimee didnot choose to have so many things! If Gerard de Nerval's failure of agreat genius had failed in the comic instead of the romantic-tragicaldirection, he would have had some too--in fact he had it in theembryonic and unachieved fashion in which the author of _Gaspard de laNuit_, and Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine have had it since in verse andprose. But Gautier has it plump and plain, and without any help from thestrange counterfeiting fantasy of verse which sometimes confers it. Hehas it always; at all times of his life; in the hackwork which madeabortion of so much greater literature, and in his actually greatliterature, poems, novels, travels--what not. But he never has it morestrongly, vividly, and originally than in _Les Jeune-France_, acoming-of-age book almost as old as _mil-huit-cent-trente_, written inpart no doubt in the immortal _gilet rouge_ itself, if only as kept forstudy wear like Diderot's old dressing-gown.

  There are two dangers lying in wait for the reader of the book. One isthe ordinary and quite respectable putting-out-of-the-lip at itsjuvenile improprieties; the other, a little more subtle, is the notionthat the things, improper or not (and some of them are quite _not_), aremere _juvenilia_--clever undergraduate work. The first requires nospecial counterblast; the old monition, "Don't like it for itsimpropriety, but also don't let its impropriety hide its merits from youif it has any," will suffice. The other is, as has been said, moreinsidious. I can only say that I have read much undergraduate or butslightly post-graduate literature of many generations--before the day of_Les Jeune-France_, about its date, between that day and my own seasonof passing through those "sweet hours and the fleetest of time," andsince that season till the present moment. But many equals of this bookI have not read.

  It is of course necessary to remember that it is expressly subtitled"Romans Goguenards," thereby preparing the reader for the reverse ofseriousness. That reverse, especially in young hands, is a difficultthing to manage. "Guffaw" and "yawn" are two words which have actuallytwo letters in common; _y_ and _g_ are notoriously interchangeable insome dialects and circumstances, while _n_ and _u_ are the despair ofthe copyist or the student of copies. There remain only "ff"--thelightest of literals. We need not cite _nominatim_ (indeed it might berash) the endless examples in French and English where the guffaw of thewriter excites the yawn of the reader. But this is hardly ever the case,at least as I find it, with Gautier.

  The _Preface_, in which the author presents himself in his unregenerateand un-"young-France" condition, is really a triumph; I wish I couldgive the whole of it here. And what is more, it is a sort of epitome byanticipation of the entire Gautier, though without, of course, themastery of artistry he attained in years of laborious prose and verse.For that quality of humour which his younger friend Taine was to definehappily, though by no means to his own comfort or approval, in thephrase devoted to one of our English masters of it, "Il se moque de sesemotions a l'instant meme ou il s'y livre," you must go to Fielding orto Thackeray to beat it.

  He (the supposed author) _was_ the most ordinary and insignificantcreature in the world. He had never either killed a policeman norcommitted suicide; he possessed neither pipe, nor dagger, _ni quoi quece soit qui ait du caractere_. He _did_ like cats (which tastefortunately remained with Gautier himself throughout his life), and hisreflections on politics had arrived at a final result of zero (anotherabiding feature, by the way, with "Theo"). He never could learn to playat cards. He thought artists were merely mountebanks, etc., etc. Butsome kind friends took him in hand and made him an accomplishedJeune-France. He took to himself a very long _nom de guerre_, a veryshort moustache, a middle parting to his hair (the history of themiddle parting would be worth writing), and a "delirious" waistcoat. Helearnt to smoke, and to get "Byronically" drunk. He bought an Italianstiletto (by great luck he had a sallow complexion naturally); a silkrope-ladder ("which is of the first importance"); several reams of paperfor love-letters, and a supply of rose-coloured and avanturine wax.[206]He is going to be, if he is not as yet, "fatal," "vague,""fallen-angelical," "volcanic." There is only one desirable qualitywhich unkind fate has put beyond his reach. He is not, and cannot makehimself, an illegitimate child! Now, I am sorry for any one who, havingread this, cannot lean back in his chair and follow it up for himself bya series of fancy pictures of Jeunes-something from 1830 to 1918.[207]

  Of the actual stories "Daniel Jovard" takes up the cue of the _Preface_directly, and describes the genesis of a _romantique a tous crins_."Onuphrius" honestly sub-titles itself "Les Vexations Fantastiques d'unadmirateur d'Hoffmann," and has, I think, sometimes been dismissed as aHoffmannesque _pastiche_. Far be it from me to hint the slightestdenigration of the author of the _Phantasiestuecke_ and the_Nachtstuecke_, of the _Serapion's-Brueder_ and the _Kater Murr_--not theleast pleasing features on the right side of the half-glorious,half-ghastly contrast between the Germany of a hundred years ago and theGermany of to-day. But "Onuphrius" is Hoffmann Gautierised, German"Franciolated," a _Walpurgisnacht_ softened by Morgane la Fee. "EliasWildmanstadius," one of the earliest, remains one of the mostagreeable,
pictures of a fanatic of the mediaeval. The overture and thefinale, both pieces in which the great motto "Trinq!" is perhaps a verylittle abused, nevertheless contain a considerable amount of wisdom, andthe last not a little wit.[208] But the central story _Celle-ci etCelle-la_, which fills nearly half the book, is no doubt the article onwhich one must--as far as this essay-piece is concerned--judge Gautier'stale-telling gifts. It is "improper" in part; indeed, the thing, whichis largely dialogic, may be thought to have been a young romantic'schallenge to Crebillon. The points of the contest would require a verycareful judge to reckon them out. Although Gautier was no democrat, andcertainly no misogynist, his lady of quality, Madame de M., is terriblybelow the Crebillonesque Marquises and Celies in every respect, exceptthe beauty, which we have to take on trust; while, if she is not quitesuch a fiend as Laclos's heroine, she is also unlike her in beingstupid. The hero, Rodolphe, though by no means a cad and possessed ofmuch more heart than M. de Clerval or Clitandre, has neither theirmanners nor their wit. But Mariette, the _servante-maitresse_, thoughmuch less moral, is much more attractive than Pamela; the whole of thestory is hit off with a pleasant mixture of humour, narrative faculty,bright phrase,[209] and good nature, of which the first is simply absentin Crebillon and the last rather dubiously present.

  We may return very shortly to the later, longer, and, I suppose, moreaccomplished stories before relinquishing Gautier.

  [Sidenote: Return to _Fortunio_.]

  I have known very good people who liked _Fortunio_; I care for it lessthan for any other of its author's tales. The fabulously rich andentirely heartless hero has not merely the extravagance but (which isvery rare with Gautier) the vulgarity of Byronism; the opening orgie,by an oversight so strange that it may almost seem to be no oversight atall, reminds one only too forcibly of the ironic treatment accorded tothat institution in _Les Jeune-France_, and suffers from thereminder; the blending of East and West and the _Arabian Night_ haremsin Paris, "unbeknown" to everybody,[210] almost attain that_plusquam_-Aristotelian state of reprobation, the impossible which isalso improbable; and the courtesan heroines--at least two of them,Musidora and Arabelle--are even more faulty in this respect. No doubt

  [Greek: pollai morphai ton ouranion],

  and the forms of the Pandemic as well as of the Uranian Aphrodite arenumerous likewise. But among them one finds no probability orpossibility of Gautier's Musidora of eighteen, who might be a youngduchess gone to the bad. Neither is the end of the girl, suicide, inconsequence of the disappearance of her lover, though quite possible andeven probable, at all suitable to Gautier's own fashion of thinking andwriting. Merimee could have done it perfectly well. Of almost no othersof the delectable contents of the two volumes of _Nouvelles_ and of_Romans et Contes_ has one to speak in this fashion, while some of themcome very nearly up to their companion _La Morte Amoureuse_ itself.

  How Gautier managed to keep all this comparatively serious, if not quiteso, in treatment, is perhaps less difficult to make out than why he tookthe trouble to do so. But it is the entire absences of irony on the oneside and on the other of the dream-quality--the pure imagination whichmakes the impossibilities of _La Morte_ and of _Arria Marcella_, andeven of the trifle _Omphale_, so delightful--that deprives _Fortunio_ ofattraction in my eyes. Such faint glimmerings of it as there are areconfined to two very minor characters:--one of the courtesans, Cinthia,a beautiful statuesque Roman, who has simplified the costume-problem bywearing nothing--literally nothing--except one of two dresses, one blackvelvet and the other white watered silk; and the "Count George" (we arenever told his surname), who gives the overture-orgie. One might, as thelady said to Professor Wilson in regard to the _Noctes_, say to him, "Ireally think you eat too many oysters, and drink too much [not indeed inhis case] whisky," and I can find no excuse for his deliberatelyupsetting an enormous bowl of flaming arrack punch on a floor swept bywomen's dresses. But he is quite human, and he makes the best speech andscene in the book when he remonstrates with Musidora for secludingherself because she cannot discover the elusive marquis-rajahtiger-keeper,--and, I fear I must add, "tiger" himself,--from whom thething takes its title.[211]

  [Sidenote: And others.]

  It is, however, almost worth while to go through the freak-splendoursand transformation-scene excitements of _Fortunio_ to prepare thepalate[212] to enjoy _La Toison d'Or_ which follows. Here is once morethe true Gautieresque humour, good humour, marvellous word-painting, andromance, agreeably--indeed charmingly--twisted together. There is nofairy-story transposed into a modern and probable key which surpassesthis of the painter Tiburce; and the disorderly curios of his rooms; andhis sudden and heroic determination to fall desperately in love with ablonde; and his setting off to Flanders to find one; and thefruitlessness of his search and his bewitchment with the Magdalen in the"Descent from the Cross" at Antwerp (ah! what has become of it?); andhis casual discovery and courtship of a girl like that celestialconvertite; and her sorrow when she finds that she is only a substitute;and her victory by persuading her lover to paint her _as_ the Magdalenand so work off the witchery.[213] Of course some one may shrugshoulders and murmur, "Always the _berquinade_?" But I do not think _LaMorte Amoureuse_ was a _berquinade_.

  [Sidenote: Longer books, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_ and others.]

  Of Gautier's longer books it is not necessary to say much, because, withperhaps one exception, they are admittedly not his forte.[214] Of thelongest, _Le Capitaine Fracasse_, I am myself very fond. Its opening andfirst published division, _Le Chateau de la Misere_, is one of thefinest pieces of description in the whole range of the French novel; andthere are many interesting scenes, especially the great duel of the heroSigognac with the bravo Lampourde. But some make it a reproach, not, Ithink, of very damaging validity, that so much of the book is littlemore than a "study off" the _Roman Comique_;[215] and it is, though notexactly a reproach, a great misfortune that in time, kind, and almosteverything else it enters into competition with Dumas, whose gifts as amanager of such things were as much above Gautier's as his powers as awriter were below Theo's. _Le Roman de la Momie_, though possessing theabiding talisman of style, suffers in the first place from being mereEgyptology novelised, and in the second from the same thing having beendone, on a scale much better suited to the author, in _Le Pied de laMomie_. Nor are _Spirite_ and _Militona_ free from parallel charges:while _La Belle Jenny_--that single and unfortunate appeal to the_abonne_ noted above--really may fail to amuse those who are not "irkedby the style."

  [Sidenote: _Mlle. de Maupin._]

  There remains the most notorious and the most abused of all Gautier'swork, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. Perhaps here also, as in the case of _LaMorte Amoureuse_, I cannot do better than simply reprint, with veryslight addition, what I said of the book nearly forty years ago. For thecase is a peculiar one, and I have made no change in my own estimate,though I think the inclusion of the _Preface_--not because I agree withit any less--more dubious than I did then. In this _Preface_ thedoctrine of "art for art's sake" and of its consequent independence ofany _licet_ or _non-licet_ from morality is put with great ability andno little cogency, but in a fashion essentially juvenile, from its wantof measure and its evident wish to provoke as much as to prove.[216]Without it the book would probably have excited far less odium andopprobrium than it has actually done; it would, if separate, be anexcellent critical essay on the general subject; while in its actualposition it almost subjects the text to the curse of purpose, from whichnothing which claims to be art ought (according to the doctrine of bothpreface and book) to be more free.

  With the novel itself it is difficult to deal in the way of abstract andoccasional excerpt, not merely because of its breaches of theproprieties, but on account of the plan on which it is written. Amixture of letters and narrative,[217] dealing almost entirely withemotions, and scarcely at all with incidents, it defies narrativeanalysis such as that which was given to its elder sister innaughtiness, _La Religieuse_. It would seem that Goethe, who in manyways influenced
Gautier, is responsible to some extent for its form, andperhaps for the fact that _As You Like It_ plays an even more importantpart in it than _Hamlet_ plays in _Wilhelm Meister_. No one who has readit can fail thenceforward to associate a new charm with the image ofRosalind, even though she be one of Shakespeare's most graciouscreations; and this I know is a bold word. But, in truth, it is in moreways than one an unspeakable book. Those who like may point to a coupleof pages of loose description at the end, a dialogue in the style of apolite _Jacques le Fataliste_ in the middle, a dozen phrases of ahazardous character scattered here and there. Diderot himself--nostrait-laced judge, indeed _particeps ejusdem criminis_--remarked longago, and truly enough, that errors of this sort punish themselves byrestricting the circulation, and diminishing the chance of life of thebook, or other work, that contains them. But it is not these things thatthe admirers of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ admire. It is the wonderful andfinal expression, repeated, but subtly shaded and differenced, in thethree characters of Albert, Rosette, and Madeleine herself, of theaspiration which, as I have said, colours Gautier's whole work. If he,as has been justly remarked, was the priest of beauty, _Mademoiselle deMaupin_ is certainly one of the sacred books of the cult. The apostle towhom it was revealed was young, and perhaps he has mingled words of claywith words of gold. It would be difficult to find a Bowdler for thisMadeleine, and impossible to adapt her to the use of families. But thosewho understand as they read, and can reject the evil and hold fast thegood, who desire sometimes to retire from the meditation of the wearyways of ordinary life to the land of clear colours and stories, wherethere is none of this weariness, who are not to be scared by the poet'sharmless puppets or tempted by his guileless baits--they at least willtake her as she is and be thankful.[218]

  Still, as has been said, the book might have been made still better bybeing cut down a little; not, indeed, to the dimensions of a very shortstory, but to something like those of _Fortunio_ or of _Jettatura_. Forundoubtedly, while Gautier had an all but unsurpassed command of theshort story proper, a really long one was apt to develop some things inhim which, if they were not essentially faults, were not likely toimprove a full-sized novel. He would too much abound in description; thewant of _evolution_ of character--his character is not bad in itself,but it is, to use modern slang, rather static than dynamic--naturallyshows itself more; and readers who want an elaborate plot look for itlonger and are more angry at not being fed. But for the short, shorter,and shortest kind--the story which may run from ten to a hundred pageswith no meticulous limitations on either side--it seems to me that inthe French nineteenth century there are only three other persons who canbe in any way classed with him. One of these, his early contemporary,Charles de Bernard, and another, who only became known after his death,Guy de Maupassant, are to be treated in other chapters here. Moreover,Bernard was slighter, though not so slight as he has sometimes beenthought; and Maupassant, though very far from slight, had a _lesion_ (ashis own school would say) which interfered with universality. The thirdcompetitor, not yet named, who was Gautier's almost exact contemporary,though he began a very little earlier and left off a little earlier too,carried metal infinitely heavier than the pleasant author of _LeParatonnerre_, and though not free from partly disabling prejudices, hadmore balance[219] than Maupassant. He had more head and less heart, moreprose logic and less poetical fancy, more actuality and less dream than"Theo." But I at least can find no critical abacus on which, by tottingup the values of both, I can make one greatly outvalue the other. And tothe understanding I must have already spoken the name of ProsperMerimee.[220]

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Merimee.]

  All the world knows _Carmen_, though it may be feared that the knowledgehas been conveyed to more people by the mixed and inferior medium ofthe stage and music than by the pure literature of the original tale.Yet it may be generously granted that the lower introduction may haveinduced some to go on, or back, to the higher. Of the unfaultyfaultlessness of that original there has never been any denial worthlistening to; the gainsayers having been persons who succumbed either tonon-literary prejudice[221] of one kind or another or to the peculiarlychildish habit of going against established opinion. For combinedinterest of matter and perfection of form I should put it among thedozen best short stories of the world so far as I am acquainted withthem. The appendix about the gipsies is indeed a superfluity,induced, it would seem, partly by Merimee's wish to have a gibe atBorrow for being a missionary, and partly by a touch ofinspectorial-professorial[222] habit in him which is frequently apparentand decidedly curious. But it is an appendix of the most appendicious,and can be cut away without the slightest Manx-cat effect. From thestory itself not a word could be abstracted without loss nor one addedto it without danger. The way in which the narrator--it is impossible totell the number of the authors who have wrecked themselves over thenarrator when he has to take part in the action--and the guide are putand kept in their places, as well as the whole part of Jose Navarro, are_impayables_. If the Hispanolatry of French Romanticism had nothing butGastibelza and L'Andalouse in verse and Jose Navarro in prose to show,it would stand justified and crowned among all the literary manias inhistory.

  [Sidenote: Carmen.]

  About Carmen herself there has been more--and may justly be a littlemore--question. Is her _diablura_ slightly exaggerated? Or, to put thecomplaint in a more accurately critical form, has Merimee attended alittle too much to the task of throwing on the canvas a typical Rommany_chi_ or _callee_, and a little too little to that of bodying forth aprobable and individual human girl? As an advocate I think I could takea brief on either side of the question without scandalising the, on thispoint, almost neurotic conscience of the late Mr. Anthony Trollope. But,as a juryman, my verdict on either indictment would be "Not guilty, and_please_ do it again."

  But I had much rather decline both functions and all litigiousproceedings, and go from the courts of law to the cathedral ofliterature and thank the Lord thereof for this wonderful triumph ofletters. And, in the same way, if any quarrelsome person says, "But onlya few pages back you were in parallel ecstasies about _La MorteAmoureuse_," I decline the daggers. Each is supreme in its kind, thoughthe kinds are different. Of each it may be said, "It cannot be betterdone," but there may be--in fact there is nearly sure to be--somethingin the individual taste of each reader which will make the appeal of oneto his heart, if not to his head, more intimate and welcome. That hasnothing to do with their general literary value, which in each case isconsummate. And happy are those who can appreciate both.

  Consummateness, in the various kinds, is, indeed, the mark of Merimee'sstories. The variety is greater than in those of Gautier, because, justas "Theo" had the advantage of Prosper in point of poetry, he had acertain disadvantage in point of range of intellect, or, to preventmistake, let us say interest--which perhaps is only another _tropos_ (asthe Greeks would have said and as the chemists in a very limited sensedo say after them) of the same thing. Beauty was Gautier's only idol;Merimee had more of a pantheon.

  [Sidenote: _Colomba._]

  As to _Colomba_ compared with _Carmen_, there is, I believe, a sort ofsectarianism among Prosperites. I hope I am, as always, catholic. I donot know that, in the terms of classical scholarship, it is "castigated"to the same extent as its rival in point of superfluities. Not that Iwish anything away from it; but I think a few things might be awaywithout loss--which is not the case with _Carmen_. Yet, on the otherhand, the danger of the type seems to me more completely avoided.[223]At any rate, my admiration for the book is not in any way bribed by thatRossetti portrait of a Corsican lady to which I have referred above. Forthough she certainly _is_ Colomba, I never saw the face tillyears--almost decades--after I knew the story.

  [Sidenote: Its smaller companions--_Mateo Falcone_, etc.]

  But of the smaller tales which usually accompany her, who shallexaggerate the praise? _Mateo Falcone_, that modern Roman father (by theway, there is said to be more Ro
man blood in Corsica than in any part ofthe mainland of Italy, and the portrait above mentioned is almost pureFaustina), is another of those things which are _a prendre ou alaisser_. It could not, again, be better done; and if any one willcompare it with the somewhat similar anecdote of lynch-law in Balzac's_Les Chouans_, he ought to recognise the fact--good as that also is._Les Ames du Purgatoire_ is also "first choice." Of what may be calledthe satellites of the great _Don Juan_ story--satellites with a nebulainstead of a planet for their centre--it is quite the greatest. But ofthis group _La Venus d'Ille_ is my favourite, perhaps for a ratherillegitimate reason. That reason is the possibility of comparing it withMr. Morris's _Ring given to Venus_--a handling of the same subject inpoetry instead of in prose, with a happy ending instead of an unhappyone, and pure Romantic in every respect instead of, as _La Venus d'Ille_is, late classical, with a strong Romantic _nisus_.[224]

  For, though it might be improper here to argue out the matter, theselast words can be fitted to Merimee's _ethos_ from the days of "ClaraGazul" and "Hyacinthe Maglanovich" to those when he wrote _Lokis_ and_La Chambre Bleue_. A deserter from Romanticism he was never; a Romanticfree-lance (after being an actual Romantic pioneer) with a strongClassical element in him he was always.

  [Sidenote: Those of _Carmen_; _Arsene Guillot_.]

  The almost unavoidable temptation of taking _Colomba_ and _Carmen_together has drawn us away from the companions, as they are usuallygiven, of the Spanish story among Merimee's earlier works. More thantwo-thirds of the volume, as most people have seen it, consist oftranslations from the Russian of Poushkin and Gogol, which need nonotice here. But _Arsene Guillot_ and _L'Abbe Aubain_, the two pieceswhich immediately follow _Carmen_, can by no means be passed over. If(as one may fairly suppose, without being quite certain) the selectionof these for juxtaposition was authentic and deliberate, it wascertainly judicious. They might have been written as a trilogy, not ofsequence, but of contrast--a demonstration of power in essentiallydifferent forms of subject. _Arsene Guillot_, like _Carmen_, is tragedy;but it is _tragedie bourgeoise_ or _sentimentale_. There are no daggersor musquetoons, and though (since the heroine throws herself out of awindow) there is some blood, she dies of consumption, not of her wounds.She is only a _grisette_ who has lost her looks, the one lover she evercared for, and her health; while the other characters of importance(Merimee has taken from the stock-cupboard one of the cynical,rough-mannered, but really good-natured doctors common in French and notunknown in English literature) are the lover or gallant himself, Max deSaligny (quite a good fellow and perfectly willing, though he had tiredof Arsene, to have succoured her had he known her distress), and theLady Bountiful, Madame de Piennes. How a "triangle" is establishednobody versed in novels needs to be told, though everybody, however wellversed, should be glad to read. Arsene of course must die; what theothers who lived did with their lives is left untold. The thing is quiteunexciting, but is done with the author's miraculous skill; nor perhapsis there any piece that better shows his faculty of writing like the"gentleman,"[225] which, according to a famous contrast, he was, on asubject almost equally liable to more or less vulgar Paul-de-Kockery, tosloppy sentimentalism, and to cheap cynical journalese.

  [Sidenote: And _L'Abbe Aubain_.]

  As for _L'Abbe Aubain_, it is slight but purely comic, of the very bestcomedy, telling how a great lady, obliged by pecuniary misfortunes toretire with her husband to a remote country house, takes a fancy to, andimagines she has possibly excited fatal passion in, the local priest;attributes to him a sentimental past; but half good-naturedly, halfvirtuously obtains for him a comfortable town-cure in order to removehim, and perhaps herself, from temptation. This moving tale ofself-denial and of averted sorrow, sin, and perhaps tragedy, is told inletters to another lady. Then follows a single epistle from the Abbehimself to his old Professor of Theology, telling, with the utmostbrevity and matter-of-factness, how glad he is to make the exchange,what a benevolent nuisance the patroness has been, and how he looksforward to meeting the Professor in his new parsonage, with a plumpchicken and a bottle of old bordeaux between them. There is hardlyanywhere a better bit of irony of the lighter kind. It is rather likeCharles de Bernard, with the higher temper and brighter flash ofMerimee's style.

  [Sidenote: _La Prise de la Redoute._]

  All the stories just noticed, except _Carmen_ itself (which is of 1847),appeared originally in the decade 1830-40, as well as others of lessnote, and one wonderful little masterpiece, which deserves notice byitself. This is _La Prise de la Redoute_, a very short thing--littlemore than an anecdote--of one of the "furious five minutes," or hours,not unknown in all great wars, and seldom better known than in that ofthese recent years, despite the changes of armament and tactics. It isalmost sufficient to say of it that no one who has the slightestcritical faculty can fail to see its consummateness, and that any onewho does not see or will not acknowledge that consummateness may make uphis mind to one thing--that he is not, and--but by some marvellousexertion of the grace of God--never will be, a critic. He may have inhim the elements of a capital convict or a faithful father of a family;he may be a poet--poets, though sometimes very good, have sometimes beenvery bad critics--or a painter, or a philosopher, as distinguished asany of those whose names the Bertram girls learnt; or an electcandlestick-maker, fit to be an elder of any Little Bethel. But ofcriticism he can have no jot or tittle, no trace or germ. The questionis, for once, not one of anything that can be called merely or mainly"taste." A man who is not a hopelessly bad critic, though he may nothave in him the _catholicon_ of critical goodness, may fail toappreciate _La Morte Amoureuse_ because of its dreaminess andsupernaturality and all-for-loveness; _Carmen_ because Carmen shockshim; _La Venus d'Ille_ because of its _macabre_ tone; _Les Jeune-France_because of their _goguenarderie_ or _goguenardise_. But the case of the_Redoute_ is one of those rare instances where the intellect and theaesthetic sense approach closest--almost merge into each other,--as,indeed, they did in Merimee himself. The principles as well as thepractice of narrative are here at once reduced to their lowest andexalted to their highest terms. The thing is not merely fermented butdistilled; not so much a fact as a formula, with a formula's precisionbut without its dryness. If we take the familiar trichotomy of body,soul, and spirit and apply it to subject, style, and narrative power ina story, we shall find them all perfectly achieved and perfectly weddedhere.[226]

  [Sidenote: The _Dernieres Nouvelles_; _Il Viccolo di Madama Lucrezia_.]

  About the same time as that at which _Carmen_ was published (indeed ayear earlier) Merimee wrote a shorter, but not very short story, _IlViccolo di Madama Lucrezia_, which for some reason only appeared, atleast in book form, long after, with the _Dernieres Nouvelles_ andposthumously. It is, I think, his one attempt in the explained[227]supernatural--a kind for which I have myself no very great affection.But it is extremely well done, and if there are some suggestions ofimpropriety in it, Hymen, to use Paul de Kock's phrase (it is reallypleasant to think of Paul and Prosper--the farthest opposites of Frenchcontemporary novel-craft--together), covers up the more recent of themwith his mantle.

  But some at least of the other contents of the same volume are worthy ofgreater praise. One, _Le Coup de Pistolet_, is a translation fromPoushkin; another, _Federigo_, an agreeable version of an Italianfolk-tale--one of the numerous legends in which a 'cute' and notunkindly sinner escapes not only perdition, but Purgatory, and takesParadise by storm of wit.[228] A third piece, _Les SorcieresEspagnoles_, is folklorish in a way likewise, but inferior.

  Yet another trio remains, and its constituents, _Lokis_, _La ChambreBleue_, and _Djoumane_, are among Merimee's greatest triumphs._Djoumane_ is not dated; the other two date from the very last years ofhis life and of the Second Empire; and, unless I mistake, were writtendirectly to amuse that Imperial Majesty who lives yet, and who, as allgood men must hope, may live to see the _revanche_, if not of thedynasty, at any rate of the country, which she did so much to adorn.

  [Sidenote: _Djoumane.
_]

  Of the three, _Djoumane_--the account of a riding dream during acampaign in Algeria--is the slightest, no doubt, and to a certain extenta "trick" story. But it has the usual Merimean consummateness in its ownway; and I can give it one testimonial which, like all testimonials, nodoubt depends on the importance of the giver, but which, to thatextent, is solid. I have read dozens, scores, almost hundreds ofdream-stories. I cannot remember a single one, except this, which "tookme in" almost to the very awaking.

  There is no trick in either of the others, though in one of them thereis the supernatural--_not_ explained. But they are examples--closely andno doubt intentionally juxtaposed--in two different kinds, both of themexceptionally difficult and dangerous: the story of more or lessordinary life, with only a few suggestions of anything else, whichresolves itself into horrible tragedy; and the story, again of ordinarylife, with a tragic suggestion in the middle, which unknits itself intopure comedy at the end.

  [Sidenote: _Lokis._]

  _Lokis_ is a story of lycanthropy, or rather _arct_anthropy. ALithuanian Count's mother has been carried off, soon after her marriage,by a bear, and just rescued with a lucky shot at the monster. She goes,as is not very wonderful, quite mad, does not recover when her child isborn, and is under restraint in her own house, as wife and widow, forthe term of her life. Her son, however, shows no overt symptoms ofanything wrong except fits of melancholy and seclusion, being in otherrespects a gentleman of most excellent "havings"--handsome, brave,sportsmanlike, familiar with the best European society, and evensomething of a scholar. He entertains a German minister and professor,whose special forte is Lithuanian, in order that the pundit may studysome rare books and MSS. in his library; and his guest, being a greattraveller, a good rider, and, though simple in his ways, not at allunlike a man of this world, makes a friend of him. It so happens, too,that they have a common acquaintance--a neighbour, and, as is soon seen,an idol of the Count's, Mademoiselle Julie Ivinska, very pretty, verymerry, and, if not very wise, clever enough to take in the scholar, onhis own ground, with a vernacular ("jmoude") version of one ofMickiewitz's poems. All goes well in a way, except for occasionalapparitions of the poor mad Countess; but there is a rather threateningepisode of a ride into a great forest, which is popularly supposed tocontain a "sanctuary of the beasts," impenetrable by any hunter, and inwhich they actually meet a local sorceress, with a basket of poisonousmushrooms and a tame snake in it. Another episode gives us odd comments,and a sort of nightmare afterwards, of the Count, when his guest happensto mention the blood-drinking habits of the South American gauchos, inwhich the professor himself has been forced to take part.

  But these things and other "lights" of the catastrophe are veryartistically kept down, and you are never nudged or winked at in theoffensive "please note" manner. The guest goes away, but, not much toanybody's surprise, is very soon asked to return and celebrate thewedding of the Count and Mlle. Ivinska, who are both Lutherans. He goes,and finds a great semi-pagan feast of the local peasantry (which doesnot much please him) and one or two bad omens, including an appearanceof the mad old Countess with evil words, which please him still less.But the feast ends at last and the newly married couple retire, therebeing, of course, no "going away." Early in the morning the pastor iswaked by the sound of a heavy body (a sound which he had noticed beforebut never interpreted) clambering down a tree just outside his window. Alittle later, as the bridal pair do not appear, their door is brokenopen, and the new Countess is found alone, dead, drenched in blood, andher throat, not cut, but _bitten_ through.

  The whole story is told by the minister himself to an otherwiseunidentified Theodore and Adelaide (who may be anybody, but who adroitlysoften the conclusion), and with that consummate management of thedifficult part of actor-narrator which has been noted. In every respectbut the purely sentimental one it seems to me beyond reproach and almostbeyond praise.[229]

  [Sidenote: _La Chambre Bleue._]

  There could not, as has been said, be a greater contrast than _LaChambre Bleue_ in everything but craftsmanship. Two lovers (being Frenchthey have to be unlawful lovers, but the story would be neither injurednor improved, as a story, if the relation were taken quite out of thereach of the Divorce and Admiralty division, as it could be by a verylittle ingenuity) meet, in slight disguise,[230] at a railway station tospend "a day and a night and a morrow" together at a country hotel--nota great way from Paris, but outside the widest _banlieue_. They meet andstart all right; but Fortune begins, almost at once, to play themtricks. They are not, as of course they wish to be, alone in thecarriage. A third traveller (one knows the wretch) gets in at the lastmoment, and when, not to waste too much time, they begin to make love inEnglish, he very properly tells them that he is an Englishman, assuringthem, however, that he is probably going to sleep, and in any case willnot attend to anything they say. Then he takes a Greek book from hisbag, and devotes himself first to it and then to slumber. When theirjourney comes to an end, so does his, and he goes to the same hotel, butnot before he has had an angry interview on the platform with some onewho calls him "uncle." However, at the moment this does not matter much.Still, the _guignon_ is on them; their _chambre bleue_ is between twoother rooms, and--as is the common habit of French hotels and the notuncommon one of English--has doors to both, which, though they can befastened, by no means exclude sound. One of the next rooms is theEnglishman's; the other, unfortunately, is a large upper chamber, inwhich the officers of a departing regiment are entertaining theirsuccessors. They are very noisy, very late, and somewhat impertinentwhen asked not to disturb their neighbours; but they break up at last,and the lovers have, as the poet says, "moonlight [actually] and sleep[possibly] for repayment." But with the morning a worse thing happens.The lover, waking, sees at the foot of the bed, flowing sluggishly fromthe crack under the Englishman's door, a dark brownish-red fluid. It isblood, certainly blood! and what on earth is to be done? Apparently theEnglishman (they have heard a heavy bump in the night) has eithercommitted suicide or been murdered, perhaps by the nephew; the matterwill be enquired into; in the circumstances they themselves cannotescape examination, and the escapade will come out (blue spectacles andblack veils being alike useless against Commissaries of Police andJudges of Instruction). The only hope is an early Paris train, if theycan get their bill, obtain some sort of breakfast, and catch it. But,just as they have determined to do so, the facts next door arediscovered. The Englishman, who has ordered two bottles of _porto_, hasfallen asleep over the second, knocked it down while still half-full,followed it himself to the floor, and reclined there peacefully, whilethe fluid from the broken bottle trickled over the boards,[231] underthe door, and into the agapemone beyond. Once more (but for onehorrible[232] piece of libel), the thing could hardly be better.

  [Sidenote: The _Chronique de Charles IX._]

  Merimee's largest and most ambitious attempt at pure prose fiction--the_Chronique de Charles IX_--has been rather variously judged. That thepresent writer once translated the whole of it may, from differentpoints of view, be regarded as a qualification and a disqualificationfor judging it afresh. For a mere amateur (and there areunfortunately[233] only too many amateur translators) it might be oneor the other, according as the executant had been pleased or bored byhis occupation. But to a person used to the manner, something of anexpert in literary criticism, and brought by the writing of many booksto an even keel between _engouement_ and disgust, it certainly shouldnot be a _dis_qualification. I do not think that the _Chronique_, as aromance of the Dumas kind, though written long before Dumas sofortunately deserted the drama for the kind itself, is entirely asuccess. It has excellent characters, if not in the actual hero, in histwo Dalilahs--the camp-follower girl, who is a sort of earlier Carmen,and the great lady--and in his fear-neither-God-nor-Devil brother; goodscenes in the massacre and in other passages also. But as a whole--as amodernised _roman d'adventures_--it does not exactly _run_: the readerdoes not devour the story as he should. He may be--I am--delighted withthe way
in which the teller tells; but the things which he tells are ofmuch less interest. One cannot exactly say with that acute critic (ifrather uncritical acceptor of the accomplished facts of life and deathand matrimony), Queen Gertrude of Denmark, "More matter with less art,"for there is plenty of matter as well as amply sufficient and yet notover-lavish art. But one is not made to take sufficient interest in theparticular matter supplied.

  [Sidenote: The semi-dramatic stories. _La Jacquerie._]

  The other considerable and early attempt in historical romance, _LaJacquerie_, is not in pure novel form, but it may fitly introduce somenotice of its actual method, in which Merimee frequently, Gautier morethan once, and a third eminent man of letters to be noticed presentlymost of all, distinguished themselves. This was what, in Old French,would have been called the story _par personnages_--the manner in whichthe whole matter is conveyed, not by _recit_, not by the usual form ofmixed narrative and conversation, but by dramatic or semi-dramaticdialogue only, with action and stage direction, but no connectinglanguage of the author to the reader. The early French mysteries andmiracles--still more the farces--were not altogether unlike this; we sawthat some of the curious intermediate work of the late sixteenth andearly seventeenth centuries took it, and that both of Crebillon's mostfelicitous, if not most edifying exercises are in dialogue form. Theadmiration of the French Romantics for the "accidented" and "matterful"English, Spanish, and German drama naturally encouraged experiment inthis kind. Gautier has not very much of it, though there is some in _LesJeune-France_, and his charming ballets might be counted in. But Merimeewas particularly addicted thereto. _La Jacquerie_ is injured to sometastes by excessive indulgence in the grime and horror which the subjectno doubt invited. We do not all rejoice in the notion of a Good Fridayservice, "extra-illustrated" by a real crucifixion alive of a generousJacques who has surrendered himself; or in violence offered (it is true,with the object of securing marriage) to a French heiress by an Englishcaptain of Free Companions. Even some of those who may not dislike thesetouches of _haut gout_, may, from the coolest point of view of strictcriticism, say that the composition is too _decousu_, and that, as inthe _Chronique_, there is little actual interest of story. But thephantasmagoria of gloom and blood and fire is powerfully presented. Theearlier _Theatre de Clara Gazul_,[234] one of the boldest and mostsuccessful of all literary mystifications, belongs more or less to thesame class, which Merimee never entirely deserted.

  [Sidenote: _Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement_, etc.]

  The best of all these is, to my thinking, undoubtedly the _Carrosse duSaint-Sacrement_. It is also, I believe, the only one that ever wastried on the actual stage--it is said without success--though surelythis cannot have been the form that it took in _La Perichole_, not theleast amusing of those levities of Offenbach's which did so disgust thePharisees of academic music and so arride the guileless public. _LeCarrosse_ itself is a charming thing--very, very merry and by no meansunwise--without a drop of bad blood in it, and, if no better than, verynearly as good as it should be from the moral point of view. _La FamilleCarvajal_ has the same fault of gruesomeness as _La Jacquerie_, withless variety, and _Une Femme est un Diable_, a fresh handling ofsomething like the theme of _Le Diable Amoureux_ and _The Monk_, ifbetter than Lewis, is not so good as Cazotte. But _L'Occasion_ is almostgreat, and I think _Le Ciel et l'Enfer_ absolutely deserves that toomuch lavished ticket. Indeed Dona Urraca in this, like La Perichole in_Le Carrosse_, seems to me to put Merimee among the greatest masters offeminine character in the nineteenth century, and far above some otherswho have been held to have reached that perilous position.

  At the same time, this hybrid form between _nouvelle_ and _drame_ hassome illegitimate advantages. You can, some one has said, "insinuatecharacter," whereas in a regular story you have to delineate it; andthough in some modern instances critics have seemed disposed to put ahigher price on the insinuation than on the delineation, not merely inthis particular form, I cannot quite agree with them. All the same,Merimee's accomplishments in this mixed kind are a great addition to hisachievements in the story proper, and, as has been confessed before, Ishould be slow to deny him the place of the greatest "little master" infiction all round, though I may like some little masterpieces of othersbetter than any of his.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Musset: charm of his dramatised stories; his pure narrationunsuccessful.]

  By an interesting but not at all inexplicable contrast the only writerof prose fiction (except those to whom separate chapters have beenallotted and one other who follows him here) to be in any way classedwith Merimee and Gautier as a man of letters generally--Alfred deMusset--displays the contrast of values in his work of narrative anddramatic form in exactly the opposite way to (at least) Merimee's.Musset's _Proverbes_, though, I believe, not quite successful at first,have ever since been the delight of all but vulgar stage-goers: theyhave, from the very first, been the delight of all but vulgar readersfor their pure story interest. Even some poems, not given as intendeddramas at all, possess the most admirable narrative quality andstory-turn.

  As for the _Comedies-Proverbes_, it is impossible for the abandonedreader of plays who reads them either as poems or as stories, or asboth, to go wrong there, whichever of the delightful bunch he takes up.To play upon some of their own titles--you are never so safe in swearingas when you swear that they are charming; when the door of the librarythat contains them is opened you may think yourself happy, and when itis shut upon you reading them you may know yourself to be happier. Butin pure prose narratives this exquisite poet, delightful playwright, andunquestionable though too much wasted genius, never seems quite at home.For though they sometimes have a poignant appeal, it is almost alwaysthe illegitimate or at any rate extrinsic one of revelation of theauthor's personal feeling; or else that of formulation of the generaleffects of passion, not that of embodiment of its working.

  [Sidenote: _Frederic et Bernerette._]

  Thus, for instance, there are few more pathetic stories in substance, orin occasional expression of a half-aphoristic kind, than _Frederic etBernerette_. The grisette heroine has shed all the vulgarity of Paul deKock's at his worst, and has in part acquired more poignancy than thatof Murger at his best. Her final letter to her lover, just before hersecond and successful attempt at suicide, is almost consummate. But,somehow or other, it strikes one rather as a marvellous single study--asort of modernised and transcended _Spectator_ paper--a "Farewell of aDeserted Damsel"--than as part, or even as _denouement_, of a story.When the author says, "Je ne sais pas lequel est le plus cruel, deperdre tout a coup la femme qu'on aime par son inconstance, ou par samort," he says one of the final things finally. But it would be as finaland as impressive if it were an isolated _pensee_. The whole story isnot well told; Frederic, though not at all a bad fellow, and an only toonatural one, is a thing of shreds and patches, not gathered together andgrasped as they should be in the hand of the tale-teller; the narrative"backs and fills" instead of sweeping straight onwards.

  [Sidenote: _Les Deux Maitresses, Le Fils du Titien_, etc.]

  So, again, the first story,[235] _Les Deux Maitresses_, with itsinspiring challenge-overture, "Croyez-vous, madame, qu'il soit possibled'etre amoureux de deux personnes a la fois?" is in parts interesting.But one reader at least cannot help being haunted as he reads by thenotion how much better Merimee would have told it. _Le Fils duTitien_--the story of the great master's lazy son, on whom even love andentire self-sacrifice--lifelong too--on the part of a great lady, cannotprevail to do more in his father's craft than one exquisite picture ofherself, inscribed with a sonnet renouncing the pencil thenceforth--isthe best told story in the book. But Gautier would certainly have doneit even better. _Margot_, in the same fatal way and, I fear, in the samedegree, suggests the country tales of Musset's own faithless love.

  [Sidenote: _Emmeline._]

  But the most crucial example of the "something wrong" which pursuesMusset in pure prose narrative is _Emmeline
_. It is quite free fromthose unlucky, and possibly unfair, comparisons with contemporarieswhich have been affixed to its companions. A maniac of parallels mightindeed call it something of a modernised _Princesse de Cleves_; but thiswould be quite idle. The resemblance is simply in situation; that is tosay, in the _publica materies_ which every artist has a right to makehis own by private treatment. Emmeline Duval is a girl of great wealthand rather eccentric character, who chooses to marry (he has saved herlife, or at any rate saved her from possible death and certain damage) aperson of rank but no means, M. de Marsan. There is real love betweenthe two, and it continues on his side altogether unimpaired, on hersuntroubled, for years. A conventional lady-killer tries her virtue, butis sent about his business. But then there turns up one Gilbert, to whomshe yields--exactly how far is not clearly indicated. M. de Marsan findsit out and takes an unusual line. He will not make any scandal, and willnot even call the lover out. He will simply separate and leave her wholefortune to his wife. She throws her marriage contract into the fire (onedoes not presume to enquire how far this would be effective), dismissesGilbert through the medium of her sister, and--we don't know whathappened afterwards.

  Now the absence of _finale_ may bribe critics of the present day; for mypart, as I have ventured to say more than once before, it seems that ifyou accept this principle you had much better carry it through, have nomiddle or beginning, and even no title, but issue, in as many copies asyou please, a nice quire or ream of blank paper with your name on it.The purchasers could cut the name out, and use it for originalcomposition in a hundred forms, from washing bills to tragedies.

  But I take what Musset has given me, and, having an intense admirationfor the author of _A Saint Blaise_ and _L'Andalouse_ and the _Chanson deFortunio_, a lively gratitude to the author of _Il ne faut jurer derien_ and _Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermee_, call _Emmeline_a very badly told and uninteresting story. The almost over-elaboratedescription of the heroine at the beginning does not fit in with hersubsequent conduct; Gilbert is a nonentity; the husband, though noble inconduct, is pale in character, and the sister had much better have beenleft out.[236] So the rest may be silence.

  [Sidenote: Gerard de Nerval--his peculiar position.]

  I have been accused (quite good-naturedly) of putting Rabelais in thishistory because I liked him, though he was not a novelist. My conscienceis easy there; and I think I have refuted the peculiar chargebeforehand. But I might have a little more difficulty (though I shouldstill lose neither heart nor hope) in the case of the ill-fated butwell-beloved writer whom gods and men call Gerard de Nerval, or simplyGerard, though librarians and bibliographers sometimes insist on hislegal surname, Labrunie. It certainly would be difficult, from the samepoint of view of strict legality, to call anything of his exactly anovel. He was a poet, a dramatist, a voyage-and-travel writer, abibliographer (strange trade, which associates the driest with the most"necta_w_eous" of men!) even sometimes a tale-teller by name, but eventhen hardly a novelist. Yet he managed to throw over the most unlikelymaterial a novelish or at least a romantic character, which issometimes--nay, very often--utterly wanting in professed and admittedmasters of the business; and he combines with this faculty--or rather heexalts and transports it into--a strange and exquisite charm, whichnobody else in French, except Nodier[237] (who very possibly taughtGerard something), possesses, and which, though it is rather commoner inEnglish and in the best and now almost prehistoric German, is rareanywhere, and, in Gerard's peculiar brand of it, almost entirelyunknown.

  For this "Anodos"--the most unquestionably entitled to that title of allmen in letters; this wayless wanderer on the earth and above the earth;this inhabitant of mad-houses; this victim, finally, either of his owndespair and sorrow or of some devilry on the part of others,[238]unites, in the strange spell which he casts over all fit readers, what,but for him, one might have called the idiosyncrasies in strangeness ofauthors quite different from each other and--except at the specialpoints of contact--from him. He is like Borrow or De Quincey (though hegoes even beyond both) in the singular knack of endowing or investingknown places and commonplace actions with a weird second essence andsecond intention. He is like Charles Lamb in his power of dropping fromquaintness and almost burlesque into the most touching sentiment andemotion. Mr. Lang, in his Introduction to Poe, has noticed how Gerardresembles America's one "poet of the first order" in fashioning lines"on the further side of the border between verse and music"--a remarkwhich applies to his prose as well.[239] He has himself admitted a kindof _sorites_ of indebtedness to Diderot, Sterne, Swift, Rabelais,Folengo, Lucian, and Petronius. But this is merely on the comic andpurely intellectual side of him, while it is further confined, or nearlyso, to the trick of deliberate "promiscuousness." On theemotional-romantic if not even tragic score he may write off all imputedindebtedness--save once more in some degree, to Nodier. And theconsequence is that those who delight in him derive their delight fromsources of the most extraordinarily various character, probably neverrepresented by an exactly similar group in the case of any twoindividual lovers, but quite inexhaustible. To represent him to thosewho do not know him is not easy; to represent him to those who do issure, for this very reason, to arouse mild or not mild complaints ofinadequacy. And it must be clear, from what has been already said, thatsome critic may very likely exclaim, in reference to any selected piece,"Why, this is neither a novel nor a romance, nor even in anylegitimate sense a tale!" The inestimable rejoinder alreadyquoted,[240]--episcopal, and dignifying even that order though it wasmade only by a bishop _in partibus_--is the only one here.

  [Sidenote: _La Boheme Galante_, _Les Filles du Feu_, and _Le Reve et laVie_.]

  The difficulty of discussing or illustrating, in short space and dueproportion, the novel or _roman_ element in such a writer must besufficiently obvious. His longer travels in Germany and the East aresteeped in this element; and the shorter compositions which bear namesof novel-character are often "little travels" in his native province,the Isle of France, and that larger _banlieue_ of Paris, towards Picardyand Flanders, which our Seventy Thousand saved, by dying, the other day.But it is impossible--and might even, if possible, be superfluous--totouch the first group. Of the second there are three subdivisions,which, however, are represented with not inconsiderable variation indifferent issues.[241] Their titles are _La Boheme Galante_, _Les Fillesdu Feu_, and _Le Reve et la Vie_, the last of which contains only onesection, _Aurelia_, never, if I do not mistake, revised by Gerardhimself, and only published after his most tragic death. Its_supra_-title really describes the most characteristic part or featureof all the three and of Gerard's whole work.

  [Sidenote: Their general character.]

  To one who always lived, as Paul de Saint-Victor put it in one of thebest of those curious exercises of his mastery over words, "in thefringes[242] of the actual world," this confusion of place and noplace, this inextricable blending of fact and dream, imagination andreality, was natural enough; and no one but a Philistine will find faultwith the sometimes apparently mechanical and Sternian transitions whichform part of its expression. There was, indeed, an inevitable_mixedness_ in that strange nature of his; and he will pass from almost"true Dickens" (he actually admits inspiration from him) in accounts ofthe Paris _Halles_, or of country towns, to De Quinceyish passages, freefrom that slight touch of _apparatus_ which is undeniable now and thenin the Opium Eater. Here are longish excursions of pure family history;there, patches of criticism in art or drama; once at least an elaborateand--for the time--very well informed as well as enthusiastic sketch ofFrench seventeenth-century poetry. It may annoy the captious to findanother kind of confusion, for which one is not sure that Gerard himselfwas responsible, though it is consistent enough with his peculiarities.Passages are redistributed among different books and pieces in a ratherbewildering manner; and you occasionally rub your eyes at comingacross--in a very different context, or simply shorn of its oldone--something that you have met before. To others this, if not exactlyan added
charm, will at any rate be admitted to "grace of congruity." Itwould be less like Gerard if it were otherwise.

  [Sidenote: Particular examples.]

  In fact it is in these mixed pieces that Gerard's great attraction lies.His regular stories, professedly of a Hoffmannesque kind, such as _LaMain Enchantee_ and _Le Monstre Vert_, are good, but not extraordinarilygood, and classable with many other things of many other people. I, atleast, know nothing quite like _Aurelia_ and _Sylvie_, though thedream-pieces of Landor and De Quincey have a certain likeness, andNodier's _La Fee aux Miettes_ a closer one.

  [Sidenote: _Aurelia._]

  _Aurelia_ (which, whether complete in itself or not, was pretty clearlyintended to be followed by other things under the general title of _LeReve et la Vie_) has, as might be expected, more dream than life in it.Or rather it is like one of those actual dreams which themselves mix uplife--a dream in the composition. Aurelia is the book-name of a lady,loved (actually, it seems) and in some degree responsible for herlover's aberrations of mind. He thinks he loves another, but finds hedoes not. The two objects of his passion meet, and the second generouslybrings about a sort of reconciliation with the first. But he has to goto Paris on business, and there he becomes a mere John-a-Dreams, if not,in a mild way, a mere Tom of Bedlam. The chief drops into reality,indeed, are mentions of his actual visits to _maisons de sante_. But thething is impossible to abstract or analyse, too long to translate as awhole, and too much woven in one piece to cut up. It must be read as itstands, and any person of tolerable intelligence will know in a page ortwo whether Gerard is the man for him or not. But when he was writing ithe was already over even the fringe of ordinary sane life, and near theclose of life itself. In _Sylvie_ he had not drifted so far; and it isperhaps his best diploma-piece.[243]

  [Sidenote: And especially _Sylvie_.]

  For _Sylvie_, with its sub-title, "Souvenirs du Valois," surely exhibitsGerard, outside the pure travel-books, at his very best, as far asconcerns that mixture of _reve_ and _realite_--the far-off goal ofGautier's[244] _Chimere_--which has been spoken of. The author comes outof a theatre where he has only seen Her, having never, though a constantworshipper, troubled himself to ask, much less to seek out, what Shemight be off the stage. And here we may give an actual piece of him.

  We were living then in a strange kind of time,[245] one of those which are wont to come after revolutions, or the decadences of great reigns. There was no longer any gallantry of the heroic kind, as in the time of the Fronde; no vice, elegant and in full dress, as in that of the Regency; no "Directory" scepticism and foolish orgies. It was a mixture of activity, hesitation, and idleness--of brilliant utopias; of religious or philosophical aspiration; of vague enthusiasms mingled with certain instincts of a sort of Renaissance. Men were weary of past discords; of uncertain hopes, much as in the time of Petronius or Peregrinus. The materialist part of us hungered for the bouquet of roses which in the hands of Isis was to regenerate it--the Goddess, eternally young and pure, appeared to us at night and made us ashamed of the hours we had lost in the day. We were not at the age of ambition, and the greedy hunt for place and honours kept us out of possible spheres of work. Only the poet's Ivory Tower remained for us, and we climbed it ever higher and higher to be clear of the mob. At the heights whither our masters guided us we breathed at last the pure air of solitude; we drank in the golden cup of legend; we were intoxicated with poetry and with love. But, alas! it was only love of vague forms; of tints roseal and azure; of metaphysical phantoms. The real woman, seen close, revolted our ingenuousness: we would have had her a queen or a goddess, and to draw near her was fatal.

  But he went from the play to his club, and there somebody asked him forwhat person (in such cases one regrets _laquelle_) he went so constantlyto the same house; and, on the actress being named, kindly pointed outto him a third member of this club as the lady's lover-in-title. Thepeculiar etiquette of the institution demanded, it seems, that thefortunate gallant should escort the beloved home, but then go to the_cercle_ and play (they were wise enough to play whist then) for greatpart of the night before exercising the remainder of his rights andprivileges. In the interval, apparently, other cats might be grey. And,as it happened, Gerard saw in a paper that some shares of his, longrubbish, had become of value. He would be better off; he might aspireto a portion of the lady's spare hours. But this notion, it is notsurprising to hear, did not appeal to our Gerard. He sees in the samepaper that a _fete_ is going to take place in his old country of theValois; and when at last he goes home two "faces in the fire" rise forhim, those of the little peasant girl Sylvie and of the chatelaineAdrienne--beautiful, triumphant, but destined to be a nun. Unable tosleep, he gets up at one in the morning, and manages to find himself atLoisy, the scene of the _fete_, in time.

  One would fain go on, but duty forbids a larger allotment of space; and,after all, the thing itself may be read by any one in half an hour orso, and will not, at least ought not, to be forgotten for half alifetime--or a whole one. The finding of Sylvie, no longer a _little_girl, but still a girl, still not married, though, as turns out, aboutto be so, is chequered with all sorts of things--sketches of landscape;touches of literature; black-and-white renderings of the _Voyage aCythere_; verses to Adrienne; to the actress Aurelie (to become laterthe dream-Aurelia); and, lastly--in the earlier forms of the piece atany rate--snatches of folk-song, including that really noble ballad:

  Quand Jean Renaud de la guerre revint,

  which falls very little, if at all, short of the greatest specimens ofEnglish, German, Danish, or Spanish.

  And over and through it all, and in other pieces as well, there is thefaint, quaint, music--prose, when not verse--which reminds one[246]somehow of Browning's famous Toccata-piece. Only the "dear dead women"are dear dead fairies; and the whole might be sung at that "Fairy'sFuneral" which Christopher North imagined so well, though he did notcarry it out quite impeccably.

  * * * * *

  [Sidenote: Alfred de Vigny: _Cinq-Mars_.]

  The felicity of being enabled to know the causes of things, a recognisedand respectable form of happiness, is also one which I have recentlyenjoyed in respect of Alfred de Vigny's _Cinq-Mars_. For Vigny as a poetmy admiration has always been profound. He appears to me to havecompleted, with Agrippa d'Aubigne, Corneille, and Victor Hugo, the_quatuor_ of French poets who have the secret of magnificence;[247] and,scanty as the amount of his poetical work is, _Eloa_, _Dolorida_, _LeCor_, and the finest passages in _Les Destinees_ have a definite varietyof excellence and essence which it would not be easy to surpass in kind,though it might be in number, with the very greatest masters of poetry.But I have never been able, frankly and fully, to enjoy his novels,especially _Cinq-Mars_. In my last reading of the chief of them I cameupon an edition which contains what I had never seen before--thesomewhat triumphant and strongly defiant tract, _Reflexions sur laVerite dans l'Art_, which the author prefixed to his book after itssuccess. This tractate is indeed not quite consistent with itself, forit ends in confession that truth in art is truth in observation of humannature, not mere authenticity of fact, and that such authenticity is ofmerely secondary importance at best. But in the opening he had takenlines--or at any rate had said things--which, if not absolutelyinconsistent with, certainly do not lead to, this sound conclusion. Inwriting historical novels (he tells us) he thought it better not toimitate the foreigners (it is clear that this is a polite way ofindicating Scott), who in their pictures put the historical dominatorsof them in the background; he has himself made such persons principalactors. And though he admits that "a treatise on the decline and fall offeudalism in France; on the internal conditions and external relationsof that country; on the question of military alliances with foreigners;on justice as administered by parliaments, and by secret commissions oncharges of sorcery," might not have been read while the novel _was_;the sentence suggests
, with hardly a possibility of rebuttal, that atreatise of this kind was pretty constantly in his own mind while he waswriting the novel itself. And the earlier sentence about putting themore important historical characters in the foreground remains "firm,"without any necessity for argument or suggestion.

  [Sidenote: The faults in its general scheme.]

  Now I have more than once in this very book, and often elsewhere,contended, rightly or wrongly, that this "practice of the foreigners,"in _not_ making dominant historical characters their own dominantpersonages, is _the_ secret of success in historical novel-writing, andthe very feather (and something more) in the cap of Scott himself whichshows his chieftainship. And, again rightly or wrongly, I have alsocontended that the hand of purpose deadens and mummifies story. Vigny'sown remarks, despite subsequent--if not recantation--qualification ofthem, show that the lie of his land, the tendency of his exertion, _was_in these two, as I think, wrong directions. And I own that thisexplained to me what I had chiefly before noticed as merely a fact,without enquiring into it, that _Cinq-Mars_, admirably written as it is;possessing as it does, with a hero who might have been made interesting,a great person like Richelieu to make due and not undue use of; plentyof thrilling incident at hand, and some actually brought in; loveinterest _ad libitum_ and fighting hardly less so; a tragic finish fromhistory, and opportunity for plenty of lighter contrast from Tallemantand the Memoirs--that, I say, _Cinq-Mars_, with all this and thegreatness of its author in other work, has always been to me not a livebook, and hardly one which I can even praise as statuesque.[248]

  It is no doubt a misfortune for the book with its later readers--theearlier for nearly twenty years were free from this--that it comes intoclosest comparison with Dumas' best work. Its action, indeed, takesplace in the very "Vingt Ans" during which we know (except from slightretrospect) nothing of what D'Artagnan and the Three were doing. Butmore than one or two of the same historical characters figure, and inthe chapters dealing with the obscure _emeute_ which preceded the actualconspiracy, as well as in the scenes touching Anne of Austria's privateapartments, the parallel is very close indeed.

  [Sidenote: And in its details.]

  Now of course Dumas could not write like Vigny; and though, as ispointed out elsewhere, to regard him as a vulgar fellow is the grossestof blunders as well as a great injustice, Vigny, in thought and tasteand _dianoia_ generally, was as far above him as in style.[249] But thatis not the question. I have said[250] that I do not quite _know_D'Artagnan, though I think I know Athos, as a man; but as a novel-herothe Gascon seems to me to "fill all numbers." Cinq-Mars may be asuccession or chain of type-personages--generous but headlong youth,spoilt favourite, conspirator and something like traitor, finallyvictim; but these are the "flat" characters (if one may so speak) of thetreatise, not the "round" ones of the novel. And I cannot _unite_ them.His love-affair with Marie de Gonzague leaves me cold. His friend, theyounger De Thou, is hardly more than "an excellent person." Thepersecution of Urbain Grandier and the sufferings of the Ursuline Abbessseem to me--to use the old schoolboy word--to be hopelessly "muffed";and if any one will compare the accounts of the taking of the"Spanish bastion" at Perpignan with the exploit at that otherbastion--Saint-Gervais at Rochelle--he will see what I mean as well asin any single instance. The second part, where we come to the actualconspiracy, is rather better than the first, if not much; and I thinkVigny's presentment of Richelieu has been too much censured. ArmandDuplessis was a very great man; but unless you accept the olderMachiavellian and the more modern German doctrines as to what a greatman may do, he must also be pronounced a most unscrupulous one; whilethere is little doubt (unless you go back to Louis XI.) that Vigny wasright in regarding him as the original begetter of the FrenchRevolution. But he is not here made by any means wholly inhuman, andVigny makes it justly clear that, if he had not killed Cinq-Mars,Cinq-Mars would have killed him. In such cases of course the person whobegins may be regarded as the assassin; but it is doubtful whether thisis distributive justice of the highest order. And I do not see muchsalvation for France in Henry d'Effiat.

  This, however, is a digression from our proper subject, but onejustifying itself after a fashion, inasmuch as it results from Vigny'sown faulty handling of the subject itself and is appropriate to his lineof argument in his _Examen_. He has written the novel not as he oughtand as he ought not. The political and historical interests overshadow,confuse, and hamper the purely "fictional" (as people say now), and whenhe has got hold of a scene which _is_ either purely "fictional," orhistorical with fictitious possibilities, he does not seem (to me) toknow how to deal with it. There is one--of the extremest melodramaticcharacter and opportunities--where, in a hut perched on the side of aPyrenean gorge or canon, Richelieu's villainous tool, the magistrateLaubardemont; his mad niece, the former Ursuline Abbess, who has helpedto ruin Urbain Grandier; his outcast son Jacques, who has turned Spanishofficer and general bravo; and a smuggler who has also figured in theGrandier business, forgather; where the mad Abbess dies in terror, andJacques de Laubardemont by falling through the flimsy hut-boards intothe gorge, his father taking from him, by a false pretence before hisdeath, the treaty between the Cinq-Mars conspirators and Spain. All thisis sufficiently "horrid," as the girls in _Northanger Abbey_ would say,and divers French contemporaries of Vigny's from Hugo to Soulie wouldhave made good horrors of it. In his hands it seems (to me) to missfire. So, again, he has a well-conceived interview, in which Richelieu,for almost the last time, shows "the power of a strong mind over a weakone," and brings the King to abject submission and the surrender ofCinq-Mars, by the simple process of leaving his Majesty to settle byhimself the problems that drop in from France, England, and where orwhence not, during the time of the Cardinal's absence. It is less of afailure than the other, being more in Vigny's own line; but it isimpossible not to remember several scenes--not one only--in _QuentinDurward_, and think how much better Scott would have done it; several inthe Musketeer-trilogy, if not also in the Margot-Chicot series, and makea parallel reflection. And as a final parry by anticipation to theobjection that such comparison is "rascally," let it be said thatnothing of the kind ever created any prejudice against the book in mycase. I failed to get on with it long before I took the least trouble todiscover critical reasons that might excuse that failure.

  [Sidenote: _Stello_ less of a novel, but containing better novel-stuff.]

  But if any one be of taste sufficiently like mine to find disappointmentof the unpleasant kind in _Cinq-Mars_, I think I can promise him anagreeable, if somewhat chequered, surprise when, remembering _Cinq-Mars_and basing his expectations upon it, he turns to _Stello_. It is truethat the book is, as a whole, even less "precisely a novel" thanSainte-Beuve's _Volupte_. But for that very reason it escapes thedisplay of the disabilities which _Cinq-Mars_, being, or incurringobligation to be, precisely a novel, suffers. It is true also that itexhibits that fancy for putting historical persons in the first "plan"which he had avowed, and over which heads have been shaken. The bulk ofit, indeed, consists of romanticised _histoires_ or historiettes (thenarrator calls them "anecdotes") of the sad and famous fates of twoFrench poets, Gilbert and Andre Chenier, and of our English Chatterton.But, then, no one of these can be called "a dominant historicalpersonage," and the known facts permit themselves to be, and are,"romanticised" effectively enough. So the flower is in each case pluckedfrom the nettle. And there is another flower of more positive and lesscompensatory kind which blooms here, which is particularly welcome tosome readers, and which, from _Cinq-Mars_ alone, they could hardly haveexpected to find in any garden of Alfred de Vigny's. For this springsfrom a root of ironic wit which almost approaches humour, which, thoughnever merry, is not seldom merciful, and is very seldom actually savage,though often sad. Now irony is, to those who love it, the saving graceof everything that possesses it, almost equal in charm, and still morenearly equal in power, to the sheer beauty, which can dispense with it,but which sometimes, and not so very rarely, is found in its company.
<
br />   [Sidenote: Its framework and "anecdotes."]

  The substance, or rather the framework, of _Stello, ou Les DiablesBleus_, requires very little amplification of its double title toexplain it. Putting that title in charade form, one might say that itsfirst is a young poet who suffers from its second--like many other youngpersons, poetical and unpoetical, of times Romantic and un-Romantic.Having an excessively bad fit of his complaint, he sends for a certain_docteur noir_ to treat the case. This "Black Doctor" is not atrout-fly, nor the sort of person who might be expected in a story of_diablerie_. It is even suggested that he derived the name, by which hewas known to society, from the not specially individual habit of wearingblack clothes. But there must have been something not quite ordinarilyhuman about him, inasmuch as, having been resident in London at the timeof Chatterton's death in 1770, he was--apparently without any signs ofOld Parr-like age--a fashionable doctor at Paris in the year 1832. Hisvisit ends, as usual, in a prescription, but a prescription of a veryunusual kind. The bulk of it consists of the "anecdotes"--again perhapsnot a very uncommon feature of a doctor's visit, but told at such lengthon the three subjects above mentioned that, with "links" andconclusion,[251] they run to nearly four hundred pages.

  It is possible that some one may say "_Connu!_" both to the storiesthemselves and to the moral of real suffering, as opposed to meremegrim, which is so obviously deducible from them. But Stello was quiteas clever as the objectors, and knew these things quite aswell--perhaps, as far as the case of Gilbert is concerned, rather betterthan most Englishmen. It is in the manner of the Black Doctor's tellingand handling that the charm lies.

  [Sidenote: The death of Gilbert.]

  Even for those gluttons of matter who do not care much for manner thereis a good deal in the three stories. The first avails itself--as Vignyhad unwisely _not_ availed himself in _Cinq-Mars_, though he was wellacquainted with Shakespeare and lesser English masters--of the mixtureof comic and tragic. The suffering[252] of the unfortunate youth who waspartly a French Chatterton and partly a French Clare, his strange visitto the benevolent but rather ineffectual Archbishop of Paris, and thescene at his death-bed, exhibit, at nearly its best, the tragic powerwhich Vigny possessed in a very high, though not always well exercised,degree. And the passage of the poet's death is of such _macabre_ powerthat one must risk a translation:

  (_The doctor has been summoned, has found the patient in his garret, bare of all furniture save a bed with tattered clothes and an old trunk._)

  His face was very noble and very beautiful; he looked at me with fixed eyes, and between them and the nose, above the cheeks, he showed that nervous contraction which no ordinary convulsion can imitate, which no illness gives, but which says to the physician, "Go your ways!" and is, as it were, a standard which Death plants on his conquests. He clutched in one hand his pen, his poor last pen, inky and ragged, in the other a crust of his last piece of bread. His legs knocked together, so as to make the crazy bed crackle. I listened carefully to his hard breathing; I heard the rattle with its hollow husk; and I recognised Death in the room as a practised sailor recognises the tempest in the whistle of the wind that precedes it.

  "Always the same, to all thou comest," I said to Death, he himself speaking low enough for my lips to make, in dying ears, only an indistinct murmur. "I know thee always by thine own hollow voice, lent to youth and age alike. How well I know thee and thy terrors, which are no longer such to me![253] I feel the dust that thy wings scatter in the air as thou comest; I breathe the sickly odour of it; I see its pale ashes fly, invisible as they may be to other men's sight. O! thou Inevitable One, thou art here, verily thou comest to save this man from his misery. Take him in thine arms like a child; carry him off; save him; I give him to thee. Save him only from the devouring sorrow that accompanies us ever on the earth till we come to rest in thee, O Benefactor and Friend!"

  I had not deceived myself, for Death it was. The sick man ceased to suffer, and began suddenly to enjoy the divine moment of repose which precedes the eternal immobility of the body. His eyes grew larger, and were charged with amazement; his mouth relaxed and smiled; his tongue twice passed over his lips as if to taste once more, from some unseen cup, a last drop of the balm of Life. And then he said with that hoarse voice of the dying which comes from the inwards and seems to come from the very feet:

  At the banquet of life a guest ill-fated.[254]

  [Sidenote: The satiric episode--contrast.]

  But this death-bed, and the less final but hardly less tragic wanderingsof the victim in his visit to the Archbishop (by whom also the doctorhas been summoned), are contrasted and entangled, very skilfully indeed,with a scene--the most different possible--in which he still appears.The main personages in this, however, are his Majesty Louis XV. and thereigning favourite, Mademoiselle de Coulanges, a young lady who, fromthe account given of her, might justify the description, assignedearlier to one of her official predecessors in a former reign, of being"belle comme un ange, et bete comme un panier."[255] At first the lovers(if we are to call them so) are lying, most beautifully dressed andquite decorously, on different sofas, both of them with books in theirhands, but one asleep and the other yawning. Suddenly the lady springsup shrieking, and the polite and amiable monarch (apart from hisSolomonic or Sultanic weaknesses, and the perhaps graver indifferencewith which he knowingly allowed France to go to the devil, Louis leBien-Aime was really _le meilleur fils du monde_) does his best toconsole his beloved and find out the reason of her woes. It appears atlast that she thinks she has been bitten by a flea, and as the summer isvery hot, and there has been much talk of mad dogs, she is convincedthat the flea was a mad flea, and that she shall die of hydrophobia. (Asit happens, the flea is not a flea at all, but a grain of snuff.)However, the Black Doctor is sent for, and finds the King as affable asusual, but Mlle. de Coulanges coiled up on a sofa--like somethingbetween a cat and a naughty child afraid of being scolded--and hidingher face. On being coaxed with the proper medical manner, she at lastbursts out laughing, and finally they all laugh together, till hisMajesty spills his coffee on his gold waistcoat, and then pulls thedoctor down on a sofa to talk Paris gossip. And now the Black One clearshimself from any connection with the serpent as far as wisdom isconcerned, though he has plenty of a better kind. Fresh from Gilbert'sappeal to the Archbishop, he tries to interest this so amiable Royaltyin the subject. But the result is altogether unfortunate. The lady ismerely contemptuous and bored. The King gets angry, and displays thatindifference to anybody else's suffering which moralists (whether to anexaggerated extent or not, is another question) are wont to connect withexcessive attention to a man's own sensual enjoyments. After some by nomeans stupid but decidedly acid remarks on Voltaire, Rousseau, andothers, he takes (quite good-naturedly in appearance) the doctor's arm,walks with him to the end of the long apartment, opens the door, quotescertain satiric verses on literary and scientific "gents," and--shuts iton his medical adviser and guest.

  I know few things of the kind more neatly done, or better adjusted toheighten the tragic purpose.

  [Sidenote: The Chatteron part.]

  To an Englishman the next episode may be less satisfactory, though itwas very popular in France under its original form, and still more sowhen Vigny dramatised it in his famous _Chatterton_. It is not thatthere is any (or at any rate much) of the usual caricature which was(let us be absolutely equitable and say) exchanged between the twocountries for so long a time. Vigny married an English wife, knewsomething of England, and a good deal of English literature. But,regardless of his own historical _penchants_ and of the moral of thisvery book--that Sentiment must be kept under the control of Reason--hewas pleased to transmogrify Chatterton's compassionate Holborn landladyinto a certain Kitty Bell--a pastry-shop keeper close to the Houses ofParliament, who is very beautiful except that she has the inevitable"large
feet" (let us hope that M. le Comte de Vigny, who was agentleman, took only the first _signalement_ from Madame la Comtesse),extraordinarily sentimental, and desperately though (let us hope again,for she has a husband and two children) quite virtuously in love withthe boy from Bristol. He entirely transforms Lord Mayor Beckford's partin the matter;[256] changes, for his own purposes, the arsenic intoopium (a point of more importance than it may seem), and in one bluntword does all he can to spoil the story. It is too common an experiencewhen foreigners treat such things, and I say this with the fullestawareness of the danger of _De te fabula_.

  [Sidenote: The tragedy of Andre Chenier.]

  These two stories, however, fill scarcely more than a third of the book,and the other two-thirds, subtracting the moral at the end, deal with amatter which Vigny, once more, understood thoroughly. The fate of AndreChenier is "fictionised" in nearly the best manner, though with theauthor's usual fault of inability to "round out" character. We do notsufficiently realise the poet himself. But his brother, Marie-Joseph,requiring slighter presentment, has it; and so, on a still smallerscale, has the well-meaning but fatuous father, who, hopelesslymisunderstanding the signs of the times, actually precipitates his elderson's fate by applying, in spite of remonstrance, to the tiger-pole-catRobespierre for mercy. The scene where this happens--and where the"sea-green incorruptible" himself, Saint-Just (prototype of so manyRepublican enthusiasts, ever since and to-day), Marie-Joseph, and theBlack Doctor figure--is singularly good. Hardly less so are thepictures--often painted by others but seldom better--of the ghastlythough in a way heroic merriment of the lost souls in Saint-Lazare,between their doom and its execution, and the finale. In this thedoctor's soldier-servant Blaireau ("Badger"), still a gunner on activeservice (partly, one fancies, from former touches,[257] by concealedgood intention, partly from mere whim and from disgust at the drunkenhectorings of General Henriot), refuses to turn his guns on theThermidorists, and thus saves France from at least the lowest depths ofthe Revolutionary Inferno.[258] Perhaps there is here, as with Vigny'sfiction throughout, a certain amateurishness, and a very distinctinability to keep apart things that had better not be mixed. But thereis also evidence of power throughout, and there is actually someperformance.

  [Sidenote: _Servitude et Grandeur Militaires._]

  His third and last work, of anything like the kind, _Servitude etGrandeur Militaires_, is no more of a regular novel than _Stello_; but,though perhaps in an inferior degree, it shares the superiority of_Stello_ itself over _Cinq-Mars_ in power of telling a story. Like_Stello_, too, it is a frame of short tales, not a continuous narrative;and like that, and even to a greater degree, it exhibits the intensemelancholy (almost unique in its particular shade, though I suppose itcomes nearer to Leopardi's than to that of any other great man ofletters) which characterises Alfred de Vigny. His own experience ofsoldiering had not been fortunate. He had begun, as a mere boy, byaccompanying Louis XVIII. in his flight before the Hundred Days; he hadseen, for another fourteen or fifteen years during the Restoration,

  No wars where triumphs on the victors wait,

  but only the dreary garrison life (see on Beyle, _sup._ p. 149) ofFrench peace time, and, in the way of active service, only what allsoldiers hate, the thankless and inglorious police-work which comes onthem through civil disturbance. Whether he was exactly the kind of manto have enjoyed the livelier side of martialism may be the subject ofconsiderable doubt. But at any rate he had no chance of it, and hisframework here is little more than a tissue of transcendental"grousing."

  [Sidenote: The first story.]

  The first story illustrating "Servitude" is sufficiently horrible, andhas a certain element of paradox in it. The author, actually on his verydisagreeable introduction to a military career by flight, meets with anold officer who tells him his history. He has been at one time amerchant sailor; and then in the service of the Directory, by whom hewas commissioned to carry convicts to Cayenne. The most noteworthy ofthese, a young man of letters, who had libelled one of the tyrants, andhis still younger wife, are very charming people; and the captain, whomakes them his guests, becomes so fond of them that he even proposes togive up his profession and farm with them in the colony. He has,however, sealed orders, to be opened only in mid-Atlantic; and when hedoes open them, he finds, to his unspeakable horror, a simple command toshoot the poet at once. He obeys; and the "frightfulness" is doubled bythe fact that a rather clumsy device of his to spare the wife the sightof the husband's death is defeated by the still greater clumsiness of asubordinate. She goes mad; and, as expiation, he takes charge of her,shifts from navy to army, and carries her with him on all his campaigns,being actually engaged in escorting her on a little mule-cart when Vignymeets him. They part; and ten years afterwards Vigny hears that theofficer was killed at Waterloo--his victim-charge following him a fewdays later. The story is well told, and not, as actual things go,impossible. But there are some questions which it suggests. "Is it, _asliterature_, a whole?" "Is it worth telling?" and "Why on earth did thecaptain obey such an order from a self-constituted authority ofscoundrels to whom no 'sacrament' could ever be binding, if it couldeven exist?"[259]

  [Sidenote: The second]

  The second is also tragical, but less so; and is again very well told.It is concerned with the explosion of a powder-magazine--fortunately notthe main one--at Vincennes, brought about by the over-zeal of a good oldadjutant, the happiness of whose domestic interior just before his fate(with some other things) forms one of Vigny's favourite contrasts.

  [Sidenote: and third.]

  But, as in _Stello_, he has kept the best wine to the last. The singleillustration of _Grandeur_ must have, for some people, though it may nothave for all, the very rare interest of a story which would rather gainthan lose if it were true. It opens in the thick of the JulyRevolution, when the veteran French army--half-hearted and gaining nonew heart from the half-dead hands which ought to have guided it--wassubjected, on a larger scale, to the same sort of treatment which thefresh-recruited Sherwood Foresters (fortunately _not_ half-hearted)experienced in Dublin at Easter 1916. The author, having, luckily forhimself, resigned his commission a year or two before, meets an oldfriend--a certain Captain Renaud--who, though a _vieux de la vieille_,has reached no higher position, but is adored by his men, and generallyknown as "Canne de Jonc," because he always carries that not very lethalweapon, and has been known to take it into action instead of a sword.

  In the "sullen interval" of the crisis the two talk; and Renaud is ledinto telling the chief experiences of his life. He had known little ofhis father--a soldier before him--but had been taken by that father onBonaparte's Egyptian expedition till, at Malta, he was stopped byBonaparte himself, who would have no boy on it save Casabianca's (pityhe did not stop him too!). But he only sends Renaud back to the MilitaryAcademy, and afterwards makes him his page. The father is blown up inthe _Orient_, but saved, and, though made prisoner by us, is welltreated, and, as being of great age and broken health, allowed, byCollingwood's interest, to go to Sicily. He dies on the way; but is ableto send a letter to his son, which is one of the finest examples ofVigny's peculiar melancholy irony. In this he recants his worship of the(now) Emperor. It has, however, no immediate effect on the son. Butbefore long, by an accident, he is an unwilling and at first unperceivedwitness of the famous historical or half-historical interview atFontainebleau between Napoleon and the Pope, where the bullied HolyFather enrages, but vanquishes, the conqueror by successivelyejaculating the two words _Commediante!_ and _Tragediante!_ (This sceneis again admirable.) The page's absence from his ordinary duty excitessuspicion, and the Emperor, _more_ _suo_, exiles him to thefarce-tragedy of the Boulogne flotilla, where the clumsy flat-bottomsare sunk at pleasure as they exercise[260] by English frigates. Thefather's experience is repeated with the son, for he also is capturedand also falls into the beneficent power of Collingwood, whom Vignyalmost literally beatifies.[261] The Admiral keeps the young man onparole with him four years at sea, and when h
e has--"so as by water" ifnot fire--overcome the temptation of breaking his word, effects exchangefor him. But, as is well known (the very words occur here, though I donot know whether for the first time or not), Napoleon's motto in suchcases was: "Je n'aime pas les prisonniers. On se fait tuer." He goesback to his duty, but avoids recognition as much as possible, andreceives no, or hardly any, promotion. Once, just after Montmirail, heand the Emperor meet, whether with full knowledge on the latter's partis skilfully veiled. But they touch hands. Still Captain Renaud's_guignon_ pursues him in strange fashion; and during a night attack on aRussian post near Reims he kills, in a mere blind mellay, a boy officerof barely fourteen, and is haunted by remorse ever afterwards.

  A few days after telling the story he is shot by a _gamin_ whom oldermen have made half-drunk and furnished with a pistol with directions todo what he does. And all this is preserved from being merely sentimental("Riccobonish," as I think Vigny himself--but it may be somebodyelse--has it) by the touch of true melancholy on the one hand and ofall-saving irony on the other.

  [Sidenote: The moral of the three.]

  So also these two curious books save Vigny himself to some extent fromthe condemnation, or at any rate the exceedingly faint praise, which hisprincipal novel may bring upon him as a novelist. But they do so to someextent only. It is clear even from them, though not so clear as it isfrom their more famous companion, that he was not to the manner born.The riddles of the painful earth were far too much with him to permithim to be an unembarrassed master or creator of pastime--not necessarilyhorse-collar pastime by any means, but pastime pure and simple. Hispreoccupations with philosophy, politics, world-sorrow, and other thingswere constantly cropping up and getting in the way of his narrativefaculty. I do not know that, even of the scenes that I have praised, anyone except the expurgated Crebillonade of the King and the Lady and theDoctor goes off with complete "currency," and this is an episode ratherthan a whole tale, though it gives itself the half-title of _Histoired'une Puce Enragee_. He could never, I think, have done anything butshort stories; and even as a short-story teller he ranks with the otherAlfred, Musset, rather than with Merimee or Gautier. But, like Musset,he presents us, as neither of the other two did (for Merimee was not apoet, and Gautier was hardly a dramatist), with a writer, of mark allbut the greatest, in verse and prose and drama; while in prose and verseat least he shows that quality of melancholy magnificence which has beennoted, as hardly any one else does in all three forms, except Hugohimself.

  * * * * *

  NOTE ON FROMENTIN'S _DOMINIQUE_

  [Sidenote: Note on Fromentin's _Dominique_: its altogether exceptionalcharacter.]

  I have found it rather difficult to determine the place most proper fornoticing the _Dominique_ of Eugene Fromentin--one of the most remarkable"single-speech" novels in any literature. It was not published till theSecond Empire was more than half-way through, but it seems to have beenwritten considerably earlier; and as it is equally remarkable for_lexis_ and for _dianoia_, it may, on the double ground, be bestattached to this chapter, though Fromentin was younger than any one elsehere dealt with, and belonged, in fact, to the generation of our later,though not latest, constituents. But, in fact, it is a book like noother, and it is for this reason, and by no means as confessing omissionor after-thought, that I have made the notice of it a note. In anoutside way, indeed, it may be said to belong to the school of _Rene_,but the resemblance is very partial.

  The author was a painter--perhaps the only painter-novelist of merit,though there are bright examples of painter-poets. His other literarywork consists of a good book on his Netherlandish brethren in art, andof two still better ones, descriptive of Algeria. And _Dominique_ itselfhas unsurpassed passages of description at length, as well as numeroustiny touches like actual _remarques_ on the margin of the page. Onlyonce does his painter's eye seem to have failed him as to situation. Thehero, when he has thrown himself on his knees before his beloved, andshe (who is married and "honest") has started back in terror, "dragshimself after her." Now I believe it to be impossible for any one toexecute this manoeuvre without producing a ludicrous effect. For whichreason the wise have laid it down that the kneeling posture should neverbe resorted to unless the object of worship is likely to remain fairlystill. But this is, I think, the only slip in the book. It isexceedingly interesting to compare Fromentin's descriptions with thoseof Gautier on the one hand before him, and with those of Fabre andTheuriet on the other later. I should like to point out the differences,but it is probably better merely to suggest the comparison. His actualwork in design and colour I never saw, but I think (from attacks on itthat I _have_ seen) I should like it.

  But his descriptions, though they would always have given the bookdistinction, would not--or would not by themselves--have given it itsspecial appeal. Neither does that appeal lie in such story as thereis--which, in fact, is very little. A French squire (he is more nearlythat than most French landlords have cared to be, or indeed have beenable to be, since the Revolution and the Code Napoleon) is orphanedearly, brought up at his remote country house by an aunt, privatelytutored for a time, not by an abbe, but by a young schoolmaster andliterary aspirant; then sent for three or four years to the nearest"college," where he is bored but triumphant: and at last, about his_vingt ans_, let loose in Paris. But--except once, and with the result,usual for him, of finding the thing a failure--he does not make thestock use of liberty at that age and in that place. He has, at school,made friends with another youth of good family in the same province, whohas an uncle and cousins living in the town where the college is. Theeldest she-cousin of Olivier d'Orsel, Madeleine, is a year older thanDominique de Bray, and of course he falls in love with her. But thoughshe, in a way, knows his passion, and, as one finds out afterwards,shares or might have been made to share it, the love is "never told,"and she marries another. The destined victims of the _un_smooth course,however, meet in Paris, where Dominique and Olivier, though they do notshare chambers, live in the same house and flat; and the story of justovercome temptation is broken off at last in a passionate scene likethat of "Love and Duty"--which noble and strangely undervalued poemmight serve as a long motto or verse-prelude to the book. It is ratherquestionable whether it would not be better without the thin frame ofactual proem and conclusion, which does actually enclose the body of thenovel as a sort of _recit_, provoked partly by the suicide, or attemptedsuicide, of Olivier after a life of fastidiousness and frivolity. Theproem gives us Dominique as--after his passion-years, and his as yetunmentioned failure to achieve more than mediocrity in letters--a quietif not cheerful married man with a charming wife, pretty children, agood estate, and some peasants not in the least like those of _LaTerre_; while in the epilogue the tutor Augustin, who has made his wayat last and has also married happily, drives up to the door, and thebook ends abruptly. It is perhaps naughty, but one does not want thewife, or the children, or the good peasants, or the tutor Augustin,while the suicide of Olivier appears rather copy-booky. It is especiallyannoying thus to have what one does not want to know, and not what one,however childishly, does want to know--that is to say, the after-historyof Madeleine.

  Yet even in the preliminary forty or fifty pages few readers can fail toperceive that they have got hold of a most uncommon book. Itsuncommonness, as was partly said above, does not consist merely in theexcellence of its description; nor in the acuteness of the occasional_mots_; nor in the passion of the two main characters; nor in therepresentation of the mood of that "discouraged generation of 1850" ofwhich it is, in prose and French, the other Testament corresponding toMatthew Arnold's in verse and English. Nor does it even consist in allthese added together; but in the way in which they are fused; in whichthey permeate each other and make, not a group, but a whole. It mighteven, like Sainte-Beuve's _Volupte_ (_v. inf._). be called "notprecisely a novel" at all, and even more than Fabre's _Abbe Tigrane_(_v. inf._ again), rather a study than a story. And it is partly fromthis point of view that one regre
ts the prologue and epilogue. Nodoubt--and the plea is a recurring one--in life these storms andstresses, these failures and disappointments, do often subside intosomething parallel to Dominique's second existence as squire, sportsman,husband, father, and farmer. No doubt they

  Pulveris exigui jactu compacta quiescunt,

  whether the dust is of the actual grave and its ashes, or the moresymbolical one of the end of love. But on the whole, for art's sake,this somewhat prosaic _Versoehnung_ is better left behind the scenes. Yetthis may be a private--it may be an erroneous--criticism. The positivepart of what has been said in favour of _Dominique_ is, I think,something more. There are few novels like it; none exactly like, andperhaps one does not want many or any more. But by itself it stands--andstands crowned.

  FOOTNOTES:

  [198] Some years after its original appearance Mr. Andrew Lang, incollaboration with another friend of mine, who adopted the _nom deguerre_ of "Paul Sylvester," published a complete translation under thetitle of _The Dead Leman_; and I believe that the late Mr. LafacidoHearn more recently executed another. But this last I have never seen.(The new pages which follow to 222, it may not be superfluous to repeat,appeared originally in the _Fortnightly Review_ for 1878, and werereprinted in _Essays on French Novelists_, London, 1891. The Essayitself contains, of course, a wider criticism of Gautier's work thanwould be proper here.)

  [199] For, as a rule, the critical faculty is like wine--it steadilyimproves with age. But of course anybody is at liberty to say, "Only, inboth cases, when it is good to begin with."

  [200] I suppose this was what attracted Mr. Hearn; but, as I have said,I do not know his book itself.

  [201] I do not know how many of the users of the catchword "purelydecorative," as applied to Moore, knew what they meant by it; but ifthey meant what I have just said, I have no quarrel with them.

  [202] Yet even inside poetry not so very much before 1830.

  [203] Of course I know what a dangerous word this is; how often peoplewho have not a glimmering of it themselves deny it to others; and how itis sometimes seen in mere horseplay, often confounded with "wit" itself,and generally "taken in vain." But one must sometimes be content with[Greek: phoneenta] or [Greek: phonanta] (the choice is open, but Iprefer the latter) [Greek: synetoisi], and take the consequences of themwith the [Greek: asynetoi].

  [204] Some would allow it to Plautus, but I doubt; and even Martial didnot draw as much of it from Spanish soil as must have been latentthere--unless the Goths absolutely imported it. Perhaps the nearestapproach in him is the sudden turn when the obliging Phyllis, just as heis meditating with what choice and costly gifts he shall reward hervaried kindnesses, anticipates him by modestly asking, with the sweetestpreliminary blandishments, for a jar of wine (xii. 65).

  [205] La Fontaine may be desiderated. His is certainly one of the most_humouresque_ of wits; but whether he has pure humour I am not sure.

  [206] This is an exception to the rule of _tout passe_, if not of _toutcasse_. You can still buy avanturine wax; only, like all waxes, exceptred and black, it seals very badly, and makes "kisses" in a most untidyfashion. Avanturine should be left to the original stone--to peat-waterrunning over pebbles with the sun on it--and to eyes.

  [207] I once knew an incident which might have figured in these scenes,and which would, I think, have pleased Theo. But it happened just afterhis own death, in the dawn of the aesthetic movement. A man, whom we maycall A, visited a friend, say B, who was doing his utmost to be in themode. A had for some time been away from the centre; and B showed him,in hopes to impress, the blue china the Japanese mats and fans, therush-bottomed chairs, the Morris paper and curtains, the peacockfeathers, etc. But A looked coldly on them and said, "Where is yourbrass tray?" And B was saddened and could only plead, "It is comingdirectly; but you know too much."

  [208] They are both connected with the "orgie"-mania, and the last is adeliberate burlesque of the originals of P. L. Jacob, Janin, Eugene Sue,and Balzac himself.

  [209] It is here that the famous return of a kiss _revu, corrige etconsiderablement augmente_ is recorded.

  [210] He (it is some excuse for him that this suggested a better thingin certain _New Arabian Nights_) buys, furnishes, and subsequentlydeserts an empty house to give a ball in, and put his friends on noscent of his own abode; but he makes this "own abode" a sort of CrystalPalace in the centre of a whole ring-fence of streets, with the oldfronts of the houses kept to avert suspicion of the Seraglio of Easternbeauties, the menagerie and beast fights, and the slaves whom (it israther suggested than definitely stated) he occasionally murders. Heperforms circus-rider feats when he meets a lady (or at least a woman)in the Bois de Boulogne; he sets her house on fire when it occurs to himthat she has received other lovers there; and we are given to understandthat he blows up his own palace when he returns to the East. In fact, heis a pure anticipated cognition of a Ouidesque super-hero as parodied bySir Francis Burnand (and independently by divers schoolboys andundergraduates) some fifty years ago.

  [211] I have seen an admirable criticism of this "thing" in one word,"Cold!"

  [212] On the cayenne-and-claret principle which Haydon (one hopeslibellously, in point of degree) attributed to Keats. (It was probably adevilled-biscuit, and so quite allowable.)

  [213] "Theo" has no repute as a psychologist; but I have known suchrepute attained by far less subtle touches than this.

  [214] For more on them, with a pretty full abstract of _Le CapitaineFracasse_, see the Essay more than once mentioned.

  [215] _V. sup._ Vol. I. p. 279-286. Of course the duplication, _asliterature_, is positively interesting and welcome.

  [216] I--some fifty years since--knew a man who, with even greaterjuvenility, put pretty much the same doctrine in a Fellowship Essay. Hedid not obtain that Fellowship.

  [217] It might possibly have been shortened with advantage inconcentration of effect. But the story (pleasantly invented, if nottrue) of Gautier's mother locking him up in his room that he might notneglect his work (of the nature of which she was blissfully ignorant)nearly excuses him. A prisoner will naturally be copious rather thanterse.

  [218] It may amuse some readers to know that I saw the rather famouslithograph (of a lady and gentleman kissing each other at full speed onhorseback), which owes its subject to the book, in no more romantic aplace that a very small public-house in "Scarlet town," to which I hadgone, not to quench my thirst or for any other licentious purpose, butto make an appointment with--a chimney-sweep.

  [219] Some might even say he had too much.

  [220] For reference to previous dealings of mine with Merimee see_Preface_.

  [221] It is sad, but necessary, to include M. Brunetiere among thelatter class.

  [222] He was never a professor, but was an inspector; and, though I maybe biassed, I think the inspector is usually the more "donnish" animalof the two.

  [223] And perhaps in actual life, if not in literature, I should prefera young woman who might possibly have me murdered if she discovered ablood-feud between my ancestors and hers, to one in whose company itwould certainly be necessary to keep a very sharp look-out on my watch.The two risks are not equally "the game."

  [224] Many a reader, I hope, has been reminded, by one or the other, orboth, of the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, which also contains the story: andhas gone to it with the usual consequence of reading nothing else forsome time.

  [225] "Merimee etait gentilhomme: Sainte-Beuve ne l'etait pas." I forgetwho said this, but it was certainly said, and I think it was true.

  [226] This is not merely a waste of explosives. I have actually seen thestory dismissed as a "merely faithful record of the facts" or somethingof the sort. One was at least obliged to the man for reminding one ofPartridge on Garrick.

  [227] A very "gentle" reader may perceive something _not_ quiteexplained, and I should be happy to allow it.

  [228] And perhaps--though Merimee does not allege this--by doing good tohis neighbours likewise; for he rescues twelve com
panions of his ownnaughtiness from the infernal regions. The mixture of pagan andChristian eschatology, if not borrowed, is exceedingly well and suitably"found."

  [229] He had at one time introduced a smirch of grime by which nothingwas gained and a good deal lost--the abduction being not at once cutshort, and the bear being suggested as the Count's actual sire (seeBurton again). But he had the taste as well as the sense to cut thisout. The management of the outsiders mentioned above contrastsremarkably in point of art with the similar things which, as noted (_v.sup._ pp. 93-4), do _not_ improve _Ines de las Sierras_.

  [230] He blue-spectacled, she black-veiled.

  [231] Uncarpeted and polished, French fashion, of course.

  [232] Merimee represents his Englishman (and an Englishman who can readGreek, too!) as satisfied with, and ordering a second bottle of, anextemporised "port" made of ratafia, "quinze sous" _ordinaire_, andbrandy! This could deceive few Englishmen; and (till very recent years)absolutely no Englishman who could read Greek at a fairly advancedperiod of life. From most of the French Novelists of the time it wouldnot surprise us; but from Merimee, who was constantly visiting Englandand had numerous English friends, it is a little odd. It may have beendone _lectoris gratia_ (but hardly _lectricis_), to suit what even theother novelists just mentioned occasionally speak of as the _Anglais devaudeville_.

  [233] I use this adverb from no trade-jealously: for I have made as manytranslations myself as I have ever wished to do, and have always beenadequately paid for them. But there is no doubt that the competition ofamateur translation too often, on the one hand, reduces fees to sweatingpoint, and on the other affects the standard of competence ratherdisastrously. I once had to review a version of _Das Kalte Herz_, inwhich the wicked husband persecuted his wife with a "_pitcher_,"_Peitsche_ being so translated by the light of nature, or the darknessof no dictionary.

  [234] Professed renderings of Spanish plays which never existed. _LaGuzla_--a companion volume with an audacious anagrammatising of "Gazul,"etc., etc.--is a collection of pure ballads similarly attributed to anon-existent Slav poet, Hyacinthe Maglanovich. Both, in their influenceon the Romantic movement, were only second to the work of actualEnglish, German, and Spanish predecessors, and may rank with that ofNodier.

  [235] Of the collection definitely called _Nouvelles_.

  [236] I have left the shortest story in the volume, _Croisilles_, to anote. It has, I believe, been rather a favourite with some, but it seemsto me that almost anybody could have written it, as far as anything butthe mere writing goes. Nor shall I criticise _Mimi Pinson_ and otherthings at length. I cannot go so far as a late friend of mine, whomaintained that you must always praise the work of a writer you like.But I think one has the option of silence--partial at any rate.

  [237] If anybody pleads for Louis Bertrand of _Gaspard de la Nuit_ as athirdsman, I should accept him gladly, though he is even farther fromthe novel-norm than Gerard himself. I once had the pleasure of bringinghim to the knowledge of the late Lord Houghton, who, the next time I methim, ejaculated, "I've got him, and covered him all over with moons andstars as he deserves." I hope Lord Crewe has the copy. (For Baudelaire'sstill less novelish following of _Gaspard_, see below. As far as stylegoes, both would enter this chapter "by acclamation.")

  [238] This has been already referred to above. After one of theabscondences or disappearances brought about by his madness, he wasfound dead--hanging to a balcony, or outside stair, or lamp-post, orwhat not, in one of those purlieus of Old Paris which were afterwardsswept away, but which Hugo and Meryon have preserved for us in differentforms of "black and white." Suicide, as always in such cases, is theorthodox word in this, and may be correct. But some of his friends wereinclined to think that he had been the victim of pure murderous sport onthe part of the gangs of _voyous_, ancestors of the later "apaches," whoinfested the capital.

  [239] The quality will not be sought in vain by those who read Mr.Lang's own poems--there are several--on and from Gerard.

  [240] "Perhaps not, my dear; perhaps not."

  [241] What, I suppose, is the "standard" edition--that of the so-called_Oeuvres Completes_--contains them all, but with some additions and moreomissions to and from the earlier issues. And the individual pieces,especially _Sylvie_, which is to be more fully dealt with here than anyother, are subjected to a good deal of rehandling.

  [242] I may be taken to task for rendering _lisiere_ "fringes," but theactual English equivalent "list" is not only ambiguous, not only toohomely in its specific connotation, but wrong in rhythm. And "selvage,"escaping the first and last objections, may be thought to incur themiddle one. Moreover, while both words signify a well-defined edge,_lisiere_ has a sense--special enough to be noted in dictionaries--ofthe looser-planted border of trees and shrubs which almost literally"fringes" a regular forest.

  [243] _Angelique_, which used to head _Les Filles du Feu_, in front of_Sylvie_, but was afterwards cut away by the editors of the _OeuvresCompletes_ for reasons given under the head of _Les Faux Saulniers_(vol. iv. of that edition), is a specially Sternian piece, mixing up thechase for a rare book, and some other matters, with the adventures of aseventeenth-century ancestress of this book's author, who eloped with aservant, zigzagged as much as possible. It is quite good reading, but alittle _mechanical_. Perhaps it is not too officious to remark that_Filles du Feu_ is to be interpreted here in the sense of our "_Faces_in the fire."

  [244] Gerard was a slightly older man than Theo, but they were, as theycould not but be, close friends.

  [245] Even those who care little for mere beauty of style--or who cannotstand the loss of it in translation--may find here a vivid picture, by ahand of the most qualified, of the mental condition which produced themasterpieces of 1825-1850. And the contrast with the "discouragedgeneration" which immediately followed is as striking.

  [246] Especially, it may be, if one has heard Galuppi's own music playedby a friend who is himself now dead.

  [247] Some would make it a quintet with Leconte de Lisle, but I think"the King should consider of it" as to this. He is grand _sometimes_:but so are Pere Le Moyne and others. It is hit or miss with them; theFour can make sure of it.

  [248] It does, of course, deserve, and in this place specially shouldreceive, the credit of being the first French historical novel of themodern kind which possessed great literary merit.

  [249] Alexander, though he actually wrote histories of a kind, was farbelow Alfred in political judgment.

  [250] _Vide infra_ on Dumas himself.

  [251] About Plato and Homer, who are very welcome, and "Le MensongeSocial," which is, perhaps, a little less so.

  [252] But see note 2 on next page.

  [253] One wonders if the Black Doctor was so sure of this on his owndeath-bed?

  [254] The first line of Gilbert's swan-song--the only song of his thatis remembered. It sets Stello himself on the track which the "BlackDoctor" has concealed up to the point. As the original rhythm could notbe kept without altering the substance, I have substituted another--notso unconnected as it may seem.--By the way, Vigny has taken as muchliberty with French dates in this story as with English facts in theChatterton one. Gilbert died in 1780, and Louis XV. had passed from thearms of his last mistress, Scarlatina Maligna, six years before, to beactually made the subject of a funeral panegyric by the poet. In fact,the sufferings of the latter have been argued to be pure legend. Butthis of course affects _literature_ hardly at all; and Vigny had aperfect right to use the accepted version.

  [255] Why should a "basket" be specially silly? The answer is that theoriginal comparison was to a "panier _perce_," a basket which won't holdanything. But the phrase got shortened.

  [256] He not only, in the face of generally known and public history,makes the man who was positively insolent to George III. a flunky ofroyalty, but assigns, as the immediate cause of the poet's suicide, theoffer to him of a lucrative but menial office in the Mansion House! Now,if not history, biography tells us that Beckford's own death, and
theconsequent loss of hope from him, were at least among the causes, if notthe sole cause, of the _subsequent_ catastrophe.

  [257] He has contrived, with the help of the gaoler's daughter Rose, tosuppress an earlier inclusion of Chenier's name in the tumbril-list; andthus might have saved him altogether, but for the father's insanereminder to Robespierre.

  [258] But she had to go backwards through the circles between Thermidorand Brumaire, and can hardly be said to have "seen the stars" even then.Vigny has, as we shall see, touched on the less enormous andflagrant--but as individual things scarcely less atrocious--crimes ofthe Directory in the first story of his next book.

  [259] There might of course have been spy-subordinates (cf. the case ofD'Artagnan and Belleisle), with secret commissions to meet and renderfutile his disobedience; but nothing of the sort is even hinted.

  [260] Vigny, with perfect probability, but whether with completehistorical accuracy or not I do not know, represents this uselessexposure as wanton bravado on Napoleon's part.

  [261] There may perhaps have been some private reasons for hisenthusiasm. At any rate it is pleasant to compare it with the offensivemanner in which this "heroic sailor-soul" and admirably good man hassometimes been treated by the more pedantic kind of naval historian.